Matt vs Japan's Ideal Shadowing Setup - How to Shadow

what's up guys so I was actually pretty conflicted about whether or not I should make this video because in my opinion the ideal shadowing setup actually costs a good bit of money to acquire and I

know that not everyone has extra cash laying around some people are not going to be able to afford this but for the people that can afford it I do think it makes a difference so I wanted to make a

video about it now if you can't afford the stuff that I talked about in this video don't let that be a limitation for you you can still Shadow you can still get fluent and japanes or whatever language you're studying but I do think

that it makes a difference so you might want to consider saving up and kind of investing in this setup because in the long term it could you know really benefit your uh language studies and

also the expensive components that I'm going to talk about in this video they have other uses outside of just shadowing that uh are pretty beneficial

as well so without further Ado what the in my opinion the ideal shadowing setup consists of three components first of all just going to want normal old earbud

headphones so these are just normal old headphones that were like 20 30 bucks I've had them for a super long time uh they're not great they're just normal Sony headphones you know they block out

some sound when you put them in but not too much they don't have any noise cancelling features or anything like that they're just normal headphones so you probably already have something like this laying around this is the the

cheapest part next you're going to want to get a Blue Yeti microphone so basically the Blue Yeti microphone is probably the best microphone you can get in around

the $100 range it it costs about $100 on Amazon which might sound crazy expensive for a microphone but it's really nice for the value that it gets when you look at what real professional level

microphones cost it can be like 500 or more even sometimes more than $1,000 and so for what you're paying you're actually getting a lot of value with the Blue Yeti microphone by the way blue is

the company Yeti is the brand a lot of YouTubers use uh this Blue Yeti microphone you've probably seen it uh other YouTubers use it before dogen uses it basically the reason why you going to

want to have a Blue Yeti microphone is because you can plug in your headphones directly into it so right here at the top there's a headphone jack I can plug in these headphones and now I can hear

what the microphone is picking up directly in real time with you know no lag at all now this is important for what I'm going to be explaining in a second but basically the reason why you

you want a Blue Yeti is for this feature right here so the feature where you can plug in your headphones and get feedback in real time if you find another microphone that lets you do this then that's totally good enough you don't

need to have a $100 microphone this is the only one that I know of that has this feature now there are ways of kind of getting realtime feedback through you

know what you're saying without having a microphone like this for example with audacity you can tell it to just play everything that your microphone's pick picking up in real time but if it's

going through your computer there's going to be a little bit and that's enough to completely throw you off and like mess up your Rhythm you know cuz you're trying to continue to speak and you're hearing

what you said half a second ago and just really kind of plays with your head so it's important that you have no lag at all and as far as I know the only real way to do this is to be having the sound

come directly out of the microphone itself and not going through your computer so uh yeah it is expensive at a 100 bucks but it's really durable I've been using

this one for years and it's also it's really great for voice calls and stuff like that because as you can hear you know sounds pretty nice and the last thing that you're going to need are

noise cancelling headphones so I've uh talked about these particular noise cancelling headphones in my immersion Hardware video I think they're really great they're Wireless the battery lasts

a really long time the noise cancelling feature is amazing the sound quality is really great so you know if you're trying to learn a language through immersion these are pretty much the most useful tool that you can buy they're

really expensive at 350 bucks but I think it's totally worth it when you consider how many hours you're going to be spending with these on your head you know and it's not important that you have these this exact model you can get

any noise cancelling headphones there's also uh the Bose quiet Comfort 25s these are the 35s there's the Bose qu Fort 25s that are only 180 bucks on Amazon I know those are really popular as as well so

those could be just as good uh so basically it's just important that you have noise cancelling headphones so the way that this setup works is that you're going to be putting in uh you're going

to plug your headphones into the microphone and you're going to put one side in but not the other then you're going to put on your noise cancelling headphones and you're going to connect

them to your computer and turn them on and so what happens is because the noise cancelling is so strong it actually is going to make it so that you can hardly hear your own voice it's actually quite

hard to just have a normal Skype call with the noise cancelling feature of these headphones on because you you can't really hear your own voice and it feels like you're you're shouting almost

and so what this does is first of all it cancels out your subjective voice now this is actually really important because we've all probably had the experience of listening to a recording

of our own voice and then being surprised that it doesn't sound anything like how we feel like we sound when we're just speaking you know normally and this is because when you're speaking normally your voice

is resonating with your skull and echoing inside your skull and there's like a actual explanation for it but anyway the way that you sound to

yourself subjectively is different than how you actually sound objectively so of course if you're trying to improve your accent then you want to know how you actually sound objectively so that you can fix all their errors and normally

this is very hard to do you have to record yourself and then listen to it back that's why you always hear that advice you know record yourself listen to it back because then you get to hear what you sound objectively because subjectively it's a lot harder to hear

the flaws in your pronunciation but with this effect where you're basically canceling out your real voice with the noise cancelling headphones and then getting a direct input of what your voice sounds like objectively because

you're speaking into the mic and then you're getting that feedback from the mic into your ear you get to hear what you sound like objectively not subjectively with realtime feedback so this is invalid like I think you could

just practice speaking with you know noise cancelling headphones on and both of these in and that would probably help you a lot because you get to really hear like oh that sounded funny that sounded funny and you can slowly self-correct your

pronunciation but the other benefit is just that since you're only having you're only putting one of the earbuds in and then you're going to play your shadowing material through your computer

or your mp3 player whatever uh now it's really easy to hear both your voice and the shadowing material at kind of an equal level without one overpowering the other and this is normally really hard to do so because

you're canceling out your real voice just on one side you have what's coming out of the mic and the other side you have the actual shadowing material and then you can control the volume uh until they're both the ideal level cuz there's

a knob right here on the front of the Yeti mic sorry you can't see it but you can control the volume and then on your computer or your mp3 player you can control the volume of your shadowing material so you can get them both very

easily to be the perfect level and then now you have the perfect feedback system set up where you're listening to real native material you're trying to repeat it and then you can clearly hear the

discrepancies between your voice and the recording and so for me it was only once I thought of this setup that shadowing really started to kind of Click for me

and really work for me and it really feels like now whenever I use this setup to shadow that it actually is is really helping me progress and improve so I know it's super expensive you know like

a few hundred bucks total I think that it really could be worth it if you are serious about improving your accent and also you know these headphones they're going to benefit you in many more ways

than just shadowing like I said before it's going to help with your immersion a lot and this microphone is also good if you ever are planning on making YouTube videos or you do a lot of voice calls or anything it is just really useful my

brother doesn't make any YouTube videos or anything and he has one just because it's a nice mic and so I think it could be worth it so for the rest of this video I'm just going to give a demonstration on you know what it looks

like when I Shadow and yeah so let's go so a lot of times when I Shadow I'll actually record with OBS OBS is a free screen capture

program that is pretty cool because it lets you record both whatever is coming out of your microphone and what's actually coming out of your computer so you know that's the other cool thing about the shadowing setup is that if

you're doing it with your computer with this microphone then you are already recording your voice and then you have access to what you're actually shadowing with so you can record both of those and listen to them back and that can be

useful as well so sometimes I record both the actual recording that I'm shadowing with in addition to my voice and then I can listen back to both over each other which is pretty fun but realistically it's probably more

beneficial to just record your own voice and listen back to that because that's what's really important right your own pronunciation so I'll do a little demonstration of both first I'll record

both my voice voice and what I'm using to Shadow and then I'll just record my own voice so let's [Music] go

fore for okay now I'll I'll just record my voice okay so that was just a little demonstration as you can see I'm uh by no means perfect definitely stumbled

around a few times but that's what it's going to look like don't strive for Perfection just keep going even when you mess up focus on the sound as much as possible and not really worry about the

meaning so uh that's it for this video again if you have any questions leave them in the comments and good luck shadowing guys