Language shadowing is apparently best done by walking around while you’re doing it.
All the videos I’ve seen of people doing language shadowing show them walking around a park, by themselves, with ear buds in, and walking around and talking. I admire parks where there is no one to look at the weirdo walking around talking to themselves in a foreign language. I imagine calls to the police are greatly reduced in that scenario.
Anyway, I’ve been using Erin’s Challenge! to try and do some language shadowing while bouncing up and down in my chair. Bouncing is movement, right? Also, one of my cats always decides it would be great to join in, so my use of うるさい and めんどくさい is really getting fluent.
When I studied Japanese using Genki as my textbook, the thing that gets pushed is that you learn all the proper grammar and -ます forms of the verbs. Erin’s Challenge is, well, closer to “real” Japanese. So mapping the speech there to what I learned is one thing.
Then…
There was one phrase I knew the kanji for, and knew how to pronounce, and then I thought I was going deaf when the actor doing the role said it. I replayed it over and over, but what I saw on the page was not what I was hearing coming out.
But, Erin’s Challenge is what Japanese people at my Meetup group sound like, at least in terms of speed of language.
So O47rashomon’s Challenge is to get to that level of fluency. Ha! Piece of cake!
Time to go bounce up and down in my chair some more.