How I Discovered my Daily Shadowing Limit
Shadowing is the best. It’s the ultimate combination of listening, speaking, and pronunciation practice. It took me a long time before I ever started doing it because it always seemed like something troublesome and boring. Once I started it (way too many years after I should have), I was hooked. I saw ridiculous progress despite my already fluent level.
Then I decided to turn it into “shadow immersion,” where I would try to shadow as much as I could every day, just like I would immerse as much as I could every day with my mp3 player. The problem with shadowing that I soon discovered was that it was extremely taxing at first. This less pleasant side of shadowing needs to be addressed because it is the cause of most people not doing it, or trying it and quitting soon afterwards.
Treating shadowing as an aerobic exercise
I’ve discussed how my main shadow time is while walking. Shadowing itself is an exercise, and needs to be approached like one. You need to build up stamina, and shouldn’t expect yourself to go all out right from day one. You know the people that try to start running an hour a day who have never run a day in their life? They usually quit after a few days. You warm up your way into shadowing just like you would running.
The strange thing about shadowing is that it has a mutually beneficial existence with regular exercise. This is why I prefer shadowing while walking, rather than sitting down staring at a wall, pondering my existence. Regular exercise gives you energy. Shadowing uses up your energy. It’s easy to quickly feel the nice balance that the two have when performed together.
Building up stamina in both
Both exercise and shadowing require developing stamina.
When you are out of shape, walking at a brisk pace increases your breathing and makes it harder to talk. Harder to talk means harder to shadow. The better the shape you are in, the easier it is to shadow. In the beginning, if I walked too fast, I couldn’t shadow. Eventually I overcame this. You might be thinking: “why not just walk slower?” This works, but walking faster gives more energy than walking slower.
The next logical step after shadow walking was shadow stretching (this is the year of fitness for Adam!) For me, shadowing is more suited as an active sport, and it took me a while to understand that. I still do shadowing with slightly active tasks, like cleaning, but it really shines where you actually are moving.
Non-active shadowing has faded away, because I just wasn’t enjoying it.
How much should you shadow a day?
When I wrote this initial shadowing post a year and a half ago, I was going all out. It was hard, and I eventually found it to be too much. Kind of like when I was trying to read a book a day for a month…
At the same time I was getting messages from people telling me how they tried shadowing, and after 20 minutes would burn out. They’d lose motivation, were left drained, and then decided to not continue with it. It can come as a surprise to even the most hardcore of Japanese learners, because regular daily immersion becomes easy and natural after a while. Shadow immersion just becomes less difficult after a while.
I recommend a small start. Add a 10 minute shadow walk, shadow stretch, or shadow chore. Then build up from there. Maybe you are a shadow sitter, and can pull it off like I couldn’t. But I want to repeat this: if you burn yourself out once on shadowing, you most likely won’t make it back. That’s a huge loss (that you will try to convince yourself isn’t). Don’t lock yourself out. And definitely don’t get cocky and think you can go 3 hours from day one.
What’s your shadow limit?
My limit now, after a year and half of doing it is about 1.5-2 total hours a day (not in a row). Usually about a 45-60 minute walk, stretching for another 20-30 minutes, and then the rest spread out through chore activities.
How about you? For those of you shadowing, what amount a day are you comfortable with? For those of you not shadowing, why aren’t you?!
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
Maybe it´s time to start using this technique.
Actually I read your previous post about shadowing but I haven´t tried it yet because I thought it was kind of boring. But it seems it has good effects so I will give it a try.
Yes, please do. Try it while doing something else, and this will lessen the initial boredom. Also make sure it is something that you would enjoy repeating.
Thanks a lot for this article. Also, I never even thought about doing it while doing chores, let alone stretching, you absolute genius.
Also, the biggest hurdle for me is too many unknown words (or words I simply can’t hear well) flowing through, resulting in me not being able to repeat what they’re saying. How do you go about tackling this? Just listen ad infinitum until you’re used to it?
You don’t need to repeat word for word. There can be large gaps of words that you don’t hear, and you can just skip them. Just repeat whatever parts whenever you can, for every single sentence. The more you do this the better your hearing will get. And since it is not about vocabulary or grammar (you can shadow something without knowing what it means), it just takes time to get used to it.
Thanks. Is your biggest focus still audiobooks?
Also this might be off topic but I really recommend Yin Yoga, it really feels incredible, and should be great for shadowing too. It’s simple, you’ll just stay in one stretch position for 5 minutes or longer. You can find more about it on google.
Yes, audiobooks I find to be the most engaging and easiest to shadow.
Thanks for the recommendation. I will definitely check that out!
I’ve recently started with shadowing following the first volume of Shadowing: Let’s learn Japanese. I was surprised to see the recommendation in the book to be 10′ a day, and given its a short book, be adviced to go over it in a 3 month period.
Anyway, I’ve finished the first of 5 units and I’m very happy, I can see how this can turn out a great tool. It took me 2 weeks (10 lessons) and I’m looking forward to make it into an habit.
Still not shure how to mix this and a walk in the city…. so I’m a sitter :-)
Give it a try for a few minutes while walking. It takes a bit of practice to get used to it, but can make a big difference in the long run.
Also, you may want to try to eventually expand it to native (non-lesson format) material listening as well.
Adam, I’m curious if you could share your results of shadowing. According to this post you’ve done it for like 1.5 years. Obviously it’s probably hard to track results specifically tied to your shadowing practice for that period but if you have any thoughts on how you’ve seen growth through it, that would be helpful. Thanks!
Actually been doing it now for 4 years. I started it at this post https://japaneselevelup.com/shadow-immersion-surpassing-speaking-limits/.
The results have been tremendous. My width and depth of speaking ability grew in leaps and bounds thanks to it. It’s what really allowed me to expand my vocabulary and range when I talk.
In other words, it’s one of the top methods I recommend now :)