You've probably learned that "I'm hungry" in Portuguese is . It is. But spend an afternoon in São Paulo and you'll hardly hear it. What you'll hear is , said so quickly it sounds like one word.
That little gap trips up almost everyone. You know every word in the sentence, and you'd spot them instantly on a page. Then someone says them at normal speed and they slide right past you, because the version in your head isn't the version people actually say.
What shadowing is for
Shadowing started with interpreters. You play a recording and talk along with it, a beat behind, copying the sound and the rhythm before you worry about meaning. It feels a little silly the first time. It's also one of the better-studied ways to train your ear.
Shuhei Kadota wrote a whole book on it, and listening comprehension is the first benefit he looks at.1 Yo Hamada tried it in classrooms with Japanese learners of English. Everyone got better at telling sounds apart, and the learners who started furthest behind made the biggest gains in understanding what they heard.2
Both come back to the same thing, which is the order. You hear it, then you copy it. If you speak first, the only thing left to copy is the spelling, and the spelling still says estou.
So we ask you to wait
The obvious way to build this screen is with a record button that works right away. Picture what happens next: you read the sentence, press record, and say it. That's reading aloud. Reading aloud is useful, but it isn't shadowing, because your ear never gets a turn.
So in Convo the Record button stays off until you've played the phrase all the way through. Stopping halfway doesn't count. We didn't want that to feel like a broken button, so the screen tells you why:
Listen at least once. Recording before you have heard it is reading aloud, not shadowing.
What it looks like
The phrase plays at natural speed. Play it as many times as you like.
Opens once you've heard the whole clip.
The phrase and what it means sit at the top, so you know what's coming. Then you listen, as often as you want. Once you've heard it all the way through you can record, and then play yourself back against the original.
What we don't know yet
We don't measure listening comprehension on its own yet, so we can't promise that this screen makes it better. The research above is about shadowing in classrooms, not about our app.
We'd like to change that, and when we have something honest to report, we'll write about it here. Until then, we built the screen the way the research says shadowing works, and that's as far as we'll go.
Kadota, S. (2019). Shadowing as a Practice in Second Language Acquisition: Connecting Inputs and Outputs. Routledge.
Hamada, Y. (2016). Shadowing: Who benefits and how? Uncovering a booming EFL teaching technique for listening comprehension. Language Teaching Research, 20(1), 35-52.