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Shadowing practice: Who Was the Greatest Leader in History

Listen to the line, then say it out loud
Line 1

Full transcript

  1. What do you think makes a great leader?0:02
  2. Maybe if you have other examples throughout history and great, again, let's use that term loosely.0:05
  3. Now, I was going to ask for a definition.0:13
  4. Great uniter of whether it's evil or good, it doesn't matter.0:15
  5. Is there somebody who stands out to you, Alexander the Great, talking about military or ideologies and some people bring up FDR or I mean it could be the founding0:22
  6. fathers of this country, or we can go to, was he a man of the century, up there, Hitler of the 20th century, Stalin, and these people had really amassed0:34
  7. the amount of power that probably has never been seen in the history of the world.0:51
  8. Is there somebody who stands out to you by way of trying to define what makes a great uniter, great leader in one man or a woman maybe in the0:55
  9. future?1:05
  10. It's an interesting question and I want to have thought a lot about because let's take Alexander the Great as an example because Alexander fascinated the world of his time,1:06
  11. fascinated ever since people have been fascinated with the guy.1:15
  12. But Alexander was a hereditary monarch, right?1:18
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  1. He was handed the kingdom.1:22
  2. He's fascinating.1:25
  3. Right, but he did not need to rise from nothing to get that job.1:26
  4. In fact, he reminds me of a lot of other leaders, Frederick the Great for example, in Prussia.1:30
  5. These are people who inherited the greatest army of their day.1:36
  6. Alexander, unless he was an imbecile, was going to be great no matter what because if you inherit the Wehrmacht, you're going to be able to do something with it.1:42
  7. Alexander's father may have been greater, Philip.1:52
  8. He Philip II was the guy who literally did create a strong kingdom from a disjointed group of people that were continually beset by their neighbors.1:56
  9. He's the one that reformed that army, took things that he had learned from other Greek leaders like the Theban leader of Pemynondas.2:07
  10. And then laboriously over his lifetime, stabilized the frontiers, built this system.2:16
  11. He lost an eye doing it.2:23
  12. He his leg was made lame.2:25
  13. I mean, this was a man who looked like he built the empire and led from the front ranks.2:28
  14. I mean, so and then and then who may have been killed by his son.2:33
  15. We don't know who assassinated Philip, but then handed the greatest army the world had ever seen to his son, who then did great things with it.2:37
  16. You see this pattern many times.2:44
  17. So in my mind, I'm not sure Alexander really can be that great when you compare him to people who arose from nothing.2:46
  18. So the difference between what we would call in the United States, the self -made man or the one who inherits a fortune.2:55
  19. There's an old line that, you know, it's a slur, but it's about rich people.3:02
  20. And it's like he was born on, he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple, right?3:06
  21. Philip was born at home plate and he had to hit Alexander started on third base.3:12
  22. And so I try to draw a distinction between them.3:18
  23. Jengus Khan is tough because there's two traditions.3:21
  24. The tradition that we grew up with here in the United States and that I grew up learning was that he was a self -made man.3:24
  25. But there is a tradition and it may be one of those things that's put after the fact because a long time ago, whether or not you had blue blood3:30
  26. in your veins was an important distinction.3:38
  27. And so the distinction that you'll often hear from Mongolian history is that this was a nobleman who had been deprived of his inheritance.3:41
  28. So he was a blue blood anyway.3:49
  29. I don't know which is true.3:51
  30. There's certainly, I mean, when you look at a Jengus Khan, though, you have to go, that is a wicked amount of things to have achieved.3:53
  31. He's very impressive as a figure.4:01
  32. Attila is very impressive as a figure.4:03
  33. Hitler is an interesting figure.4:06
  34. He's one of those people because, you know, the more you study about Hitler, the more you wonder where the defining moment was.4:08
  35. Because if you look at his life, I mean, Hitler was a relatively common soldier in the First World War.4:16
  36. I mean, he was brave.4:24
  37. He got he got some decorations.4:25
  38. In fact, the highest decoration he got in the First World War was given to him by a Jewish officer.4:27
  39. And it was he often didn't talk about that decoration, even though it was the more prestigious one, because it would open up a whole can of worms you didn't4:32
  40. want to get into.4:39
  41. But Hitler's.4:40
  42. I mean, if you said who was Hitler today, one of the top things you're going to say is he was an anti -Semite.4:42
  43. Well, then you have to draw a distinction between general, regular anti -Semitism that was pretty common in the era and something that was a rabid level of anti -Semitism.4:47
  44. But Hitler didn't seem to show a rabid level of anti -Semitism until after or at the very end of the First World War.4:57
  45. So if this is a defining part of this person's character and much of what we consider to be his his evil stems from that, what happened to this guy5:04
  46. when he's an adult, right?5:14
  47. He's already fought in the war to change him.5:16
  48. So I mean, it's almost like the old there was always a movie theme.5:18
  49. Somebody gets hit by by something on the head and their whole personality changes, right?5:21
  50. I mean, it almost seems something like that.5:25
  51. So I don't think I call that necessarily a great leader.5:28
  52. To me, the interesting thing about Hitler is what the hell happened to a non -descript person who didn't really impress anybody with his skills?5:31
  53. And then in the 1920s, it's all of a sudden, as you said, sort of the man of the hour, right?5:40
  54. So that to me is kind of fast.5:45
  55. I have this feeling that Genghis Khan, and we don't really know, was an impressive human being from the get go.5:47
  56. And then he was raised in this environment with pressure on all sides.5:53
  57. So you start with this diamond and then you polish it and you harden it his whole life.5:56
  58. Hitler seems to be a very unimpressive gemstone most of his life, and then all of a sudden.6:00
  59. So I mean, I don't think I can label great leaders.6:06
  60. And I'm always fascinated by that idea that and I'm trying to remember who the quote was by that that great men or Lord Acton.6:09
  61. So great men are often not good men.6:16
  62. And that in order to be great, you would have to jettison many of the moral qualities that we normally would consider a Jesus or a Gandhi or, you know,6:19
  63. the Martin.6:28
  64. These these qualities that one looks at as as the good, upstanding moral qualities that we should all aspire to as examples, right?6:29
  65. The Buddha, whatever it might be.6:36
  66. Those people wouldn't make good leaders because what you need to be a good leader often requires the kind of choices that a true philosophical diogenes, moral man wouldn't make.6:38
  67. So I don't have an answer to your question.6:48
  68. How about that?6:50
  69. That's a very long way of saying, I don't know.6:50
  70. Just linger a little bit.6:53
  71. It does feel like from my study of Hitler that the time molded the man versus Jengaskhan, where it feels like he, the man molded his time.6:55
  72. Yes.7:06
  73. And I feel that way about a lot of those nomadic confederacy builders that they really seem to be these figures that that stand out as extraordinary for one in7:06
  74. one way or another.7:17
  75. Remembering, by the way, that almost all the history of them were written by the enemies that they so mistreated that they were probably never going to get any good7:18
  76. press.7:25
  77. They didn't write themselves.7:25
  78. That's a caveat we should always get to basically.7:26
  79. No matter who Native American peoples or tribal peoples anywhere, generally do not get the advantage of being able to write the history of their heroes.7:29

English Speaking Practice with a B2 American Podcast Debate on History's Greatest Leaders

This clip is a two person conversation from the Lex Fridman Podcast, the kind of daily English conversation practice that sounds nothing like a textbook dialogue. One speaker asks who was the greatest leader in history, and the other works through the question out loud, landing on Alexander the Great and his father Philip II. It sits at B2, moving at 198 words per minute, faster than most of the catalogue, so it rewards a learner who already has a foothold in everyday English rather than someone starting from zero.

What makes it worth repeating out loud is the shape of real thinking. The guest does not deliver a polished answer, he corrects himself, adds a caveat, backtracks to a name he almost forgot. That is closer to how English speaking practice for daily use actually sounds than a scripted monologue, and across 91 lines there is plenty of it to work through.

The Language in This American Accent Debate About Alexander the Great

Three lines are worth slowing down on before you try to match the American accent behind them.

The rhythm carries as much meaning as the words. Copy the rise on the tag question, the flat drop of the short factual line, and the stumble and repair, and you are practising how to speak English fluently in the way this speaker actually does it, not a cleaned up version.

  • "But Alexander was a hereditary monarch, right?" The tag question at the end turns a statement into a check with the listener, and the pitch has to climb on "right" or it reads as a flat correction instead of a genuine question.
  • "He was handed the kingdom." Four short words doing a lot of work: passive voice used to make a whole biography sound almost accidental. Say it flat and fast, the way you would toss off a fact you already know.
  • "He his leg was made lame." This is Whisper catching the speaker mid correction, starting with "He" and abandoning it for "his leg". Shadow it as it stands rather than smoothing it into a full sentence, because that stumble and recovery is exactly what real spoken English contains.

How to Shadow This B2 English Shadowing Practice Clip, Line by Line

Work this one in three passes rather than trying to keep pace with the whole 91 lines on the first try.

  • Start on line 1, "What do you think makes a great leader?" Repeat just the question until the rise and stress on "great" feel automatic, since it sets the topic for everything after it.
  • Move to the historical stretch around lines 12 and 13, "But Alexander was a hereditary monarch, right?" followed by "He was handed the kingdom." Practise the switch from a questioning tone to a flat declarative one, back to back.
  • Slow down at line 23, "He lost an eye doing it." and line 24 right after it, where the speaker rebuilds the sentence mid word. Shadow the pause and the restart rather than skipping past it.
  • Once those four lines feel natural, run the full clip once at normal speed without pausing, then once more shadowing every line. Two clean passes beat five rushed ones for building an ear for this kind of English listening practice.
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