Luyện nói tiếng Anh bằng Shadowing qua video: Historical Myths That Turned Out To Be Real

You know the sword and the stone.

Magic sword and solid rock can only be pulled out by whoever's worthy of the hammer of Thor or whatever.

Now, you're smart, you know how this goes.

Obviously fake, right?

Well, Italy has a real one.

It's in a little round chapel on a hill near Siena, and it's been there for like 800 years.

The story goes that in 1180, a knight named Galgano got told in the vision to just give up violence, and he scoffed at that.

He scoffed hard.

He said that quitting his sword would be as easy as splitting stone, and then he stabbed the rock to make the point, and the blade sank in like butter,

which seems like the opposite point to what he was trying to make.

Doesn't that mean that quitting the sword is going to be really easy?

I guess we won't be seeing him and his sword together anytime soon.

Anyway, it's still there.

Handle up, buried to the hilt in the middle of the chapel floor.

In case you're doubting the Legitness?

In 2001, a chemist actually tested the thing, and the metal matches the 1100s.

No modern steel, no tricks, and radar found a hollow space under the rock.

Maybe a tomb, or maybe a colony of giant ants.

But probably a tomb.

There's also paperwork.

Rome opened one of its first ever formal sainthood investigations on Galgano in 1185, four years after he died, and put sworn witnesses on record about the sword.

And part of that hearing is still around.

Receipts.

He also died in 1181, and the earliest King Arthur's Sword in the Stone stories show up about 20 years later.

So the most famous magic image in fantasy might be a knockoff of a real sword, in a real stone, that you can really go stand in front of this week.

And nobody's pulled it out yet, by the way, so feel free to try.

You'll have a better chance of pulling it out if you subscribe.

Just saying.

So the ancient Greeks were just positive that one-eyed giants used to exist.

Homer put one in the Odyssey, eating people in a cave and apparently regular Greeks read the Odyssey like a historical textbook.

For centuries, everyone laughed at them.

But then, fossil hunters started digging on Crete, Sicily, and Cyprus, and the islands turned out to be full of skulls.

Big ones.

Like, twice the size of yours.

Shaped roughly like a person's, with one giant hole in the middle of the face.

Look at this thing, genuinely, if you see this with no additional context, there's no way you're not assuming it's a cyclops skull.

Well, in reality, they're dwarf elephant skulls, and the hole is the nose where the trunk attached.

Oh, obviously I knew that, you say?

False.

Nobody would assume that.

Anyway, the Greeks collected these things.

They had temples showing off giant bones as the actual remains of heroes and monsters.

Cities traded them, underpaid teenage tour guides pointed at them.

They became a huge part of the culture, which I guess makes a lot of sense.

It's either that or pissed the cyclopie off.

And you saw the size of their skulls.

China's old records list the Shang dynasty as one of its first great royal families, like 3,000 years back.

But scholars in the West, and plenty in China too, pretty much thought it was fake.

They made up kings to give the country a cool backstory, the way every country claims its founder was raised by wolves or descended from the son or whatever.

Cough, Italy, cough, no evidence.

And separately, this whole time, for centuries, Chinese pharmacies were selling dragon bones.

Actual dragon bones.

Well, obviously not, but it's not like anyone was checking.

It was foolproof medicine, and it worked, I think.

The thing you gotta understand is dragon bones were prescribed for basically everything.

Pharmacies move these by the ton, like Costco.

And some of the bones had writing carved into them, and buyers thought that carvings made a bone look damaged.

So some dealers just scraped the writing off before selling them.

What could possibly be wrong with that?

Well, apparently, in 1899, a scholar in Beijing named Wang Yirong gets sick and somebody brings some dragon bones from the pharmacy.

But before they hit the grinder, he actually looks at them.

There's writing on them, writing older than any modern Chinese script they could understand.

These dragon bones were oracle bones, 3,000 year old ox bones and turtle shells the Shang kings would carve into to ask questions from the gods.

I don't know how they got a response, but they kept doing it so it obviously worked.

So then, scholars followed the pharmacy supply chain backwards to a field near Anyang, and dug up the Shang capital.

Palaces, royal tombs, and tens of thousands of carved bones, which named the mythical kings in order, which matched to the old lists almost exactly.

Which is insane by the way, the proof of an entire dynasty was sitting in medicine jars.

Great for headaches I assume.

Now, hearken back to the dealers who would scrape the bones clean.

That was so messed up.

Thousands of years of history was just obliterated.

Nobody knows how much of Chinese history went through the weed whacker.

Atlantis.

A guy named Plato writes it down in 360 BC.

A rich, arrogant island city that annoyed the gods and sank into the sea in a single day and night.

People have been hunting for it ever since, and the discoveries so far include about 40 documentaries and zero cities.

Solid ratio.

I'll save you the suspense.

Atlantis, as written, is made up.

Gasp. Who knew?

But everything surrounding it was real.

So like 10 or 20 years before Plato wrote about Atlantis, an actual Greek city called Helic sank.

One winter night, an earthquake turned the ground to liquid, which is not ideal when your city's next to the sea.

The ground dropped, a wave came in, and by morning, the city, which by the way, had a temple of the ocean god Poseidon in it, was gone.

Along with everyone in it.

Greek tourists later swore that you could just sail over the spot and see statues in the water.

Historians actually called it a myth as well, But then, in 2001, archaeologists dug the city out of a lagoon near the Gulf of Corinth.

Walls, streets, coins, the whole city starter pack.

And it goes deeper, because more than a thousand years before Plato, there really was a rich island empire, the Minoans, and their island just blew up.

Santorini, one of the biggest volcanic explosions that humans have ever been around for, and it killed the entire Minoan civilization in the blast.

But the crazy part is, it didn't.

I lied.

Diggers later found Akrotiri, which was a Minoan town buried under all that ash, with three-story houses, paved streets, and zero skeletons.

Everyone got out.

Clean getaway.

That's kind of insane.

I guess they've learned from Pompeii.

Was Pompeii before that?

No, I think it was after.

100

Actually, I think Pompeii was later on.

101

So, everyone knows the Terracotta Army, the 8,000 clay soldiers buried with China's first emperor.

102

Those soldiers are just the parking lot.

103

The actual tomb of Qin Shi Huang is a hill nearby, and it's never been opened.

104

Actually, hold on.

105

Quick note on the man himself first, because it explains everything.

106

He spent his last years drinking mercury potions that his doctors promised would make him immortal.

107

As my more intelligent viewers have already realized, that did the opposite.

108

You know what mercury is.

109

His doctors apparently didn't.

110

So like, a hundred years after the burial, a Chinese historian wrote down what's supposedly inside the tomb.

111

Bro, it sounds like a fantasy book.

112

It has a whole miniature china, palaces, a ceiling of pearls for stars, crossbow traps rigged to shoot anyone who breaks in,

113

and of course, flowing rivers and seas of liquid mercury that used machines to keep flowing.

114

For 2,000 years, the thought was basically that he never saw it, because why would the river of poison metal exist?

115

Until scientists actually went and explored.

116

They walked the burial mound with instruments and tested the soil.

117

The ground above the tomb was brimming with mercury, way above natural levels.

118

And depending on which survey you read, it spread in a pattern that some researchers say matches where China's rivers and seas sit on a map.

119

Sick.

120

So, why is it still sealed?

121

Couple reasons.

122

1. Everything inside is fragile.

123

The terracotta soldiers came out painted and the paint flaked off within minutes of hitting air.

124

the inside might genuinely be full of mercury fumes, which means that the crossbow traps are genuinely not even the most dangerous thing in there.

125

Okay, one more detail from the historian.

126

When the funeral ended, the workers who'd built the inner tomb, the ones who knew the layout and where the traps were, got sealed inside with it.

127

R.I.P bro.

128

In the islands off Thailand and Myanmar live the Mokin, sea nomads, people who spend most of their lives on boats and know the water better than anyone alive,

129

and they carry an old myth about the laboon, the wave that eats people.

130

The story goes, when the sea suddenly runs away from the shore, when the water pulls back and the fish are flapping on bare sand, the laboon is coming to devour the land,

131

and you run to high ground or you get far out to deep water.

132

Right now.

133

Researchers thought it was folklore.

134

And then, guess what?

135

December 26, 2004, the sea off those islands suddenly ran away from the shore.

136

Tourists all over the region walked out into the exposed seabed to look at the stranded fish.

137

The Mokan elders saw it, said the word, and everyone got out.

138

Multiple, whole entire villages walked up the hills, boats turned and drove into deep water, which is exactly right because a tsunami barely bumps you out there,

139

and then the Indian Ocean tsunami came in and killed almost a quarter of a million people, one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.

140

But in the Mokan villages that listen to the myth, Almost nobody died.

141

On the Surin Islands, the wave flattened the entire village, stilts, boats, everything.

142

The people were standing on a hill, watching their whole world get eaten alive.

143

Which is insane, because kids who'd heard a spooky story about a hungry wave did better than an entire national warning system.

144

Mithridates was a king in what's now Turkey, and Rome spent like 25 years trying to kill him.

145

Fair enough, he killed somewhere in the ballpark of 80,000 Romans in a single day.

146

That's a full football stadium him, but that's a different video.

147

He grew up watching his own family get poisoned, dad included, so he came up with a plan.

148

And the plan sounds like something a five-year-old invented.

149

He would poison himself a little bit every day until none of the poisons worked on him.

150

A little arsenic, a little hemlock, a little viper venom, a little expired milk.

151

Ancient writers wrote that down, and historians were skeptical for a while because are we really expected to believe a guy took poisoned for years, and then became resistant to it.

152

Except, yeah, I guess.

153

It's called mithridatism now.

154

Named after him, and for a whole whack of poisons and venoms, tiny doses really do work to become invulnerable.

155

It's basically how anti-venom gets made.

156

You dose an animal a little at a time until its blood learns the trick.

157

And there's a modern example.

158

It comes from the US.

159

Can you make a wild guess which state the dude who poisoned himself for years was from.

160

That's right, Colorado, Florida.

161

Yeah, it's obviously Florida.

162

A snake guy in Florida named Bill Host injected himself with snake venom every week for over 60 years,

163

got bitten by deadly snakes about 170 times, which for a man grabbing venomous steaks on purpose every day is honestly a decent safety record,

164

and lived to 100 years old.

165

One, zero, zero years old.

166

Hospitals flew his blood around the world to save bite victims.

167

Bro, the goat.

168

My body just gives up after gas station sushi.

169

Nowhere to keep a stomach in here.

170

My life is hell.

171

Europe kept selling a version of the king's recipe called mithridadium as a cure-all in the 1700s.

172

And we also have to talk about how he died.

173

When Rome finally cornered him, he'd tried to go out on his own terms with poison.

174

However, he'd spent his whole life making sure poison couldn't kill him.

175

And then one day, he really needed it to.

176

So he had to ask a soldier to run him through with a sword instead.

177

Awkward.

178

In 132 AD, a Chinese inventor named Zhongheng walks into the emperor's court with this big bronze jar.

179

Eight dragons around the outside, each holding a ball in its mouth, and under each dragon, a little bronze toad looking up, mouth open.

180

His pitch, when an earthquake happens, anywhere, even one that nobody in the room can feel,

181

a dragon drops its ball into a toad and the clink tells you a quake happened and which direction it came from.

182

This is like 1700 years before the seismograph, and he's proposing an earthquake alarm.

183

Zhang Hang, buddy.

184

You knew what they were going to say.

185

Half the court thinks that it's nonsense, but the emperor keeps it installed.

186

Worst case, it's a fancy vase.

187

And the empire genuinely needed it, because China is like huge.

188

Earthquakes kept flattening far provinces, and news would take weeks to crawl to the capital.

189

No report, no relief for the people.

190

People starved waiting for the government to find out that they existed.

191

And then one day in 138, a ball drops.

192

Clink.

193

An earthquake had just hit the Capitol.

194

I'm lying, nothing hit the Capitol.

195

So the scholars do what scholars do best, and start calling the machine junk and the inventor of fraud, out loud, in court, while he's standing right there.

196

It says an earthquake happened.

197

Yes.

198

Nobody felt an earthquake.

199

The dragon pointed west.

200

Oh, the dragon pointed west.

201

Well then.

202

But a few days later, a messenger comes galloping in, half dead from hundreds of kilometers west.

203

An earthquake had flattened the region.

204

on the day the ball dropped, in the direction the dragon pointed.

205

Okay, crazy, it works.

206

So, what was inside the jar?

207

Nobody knows.

208

The design is lost.

209

Of course it is.

210

Seems to be a recurring theme on this channel.

211

But modern rebuilds of what it maybe looked like with a hanging pendulum inside actually work, because a faraway earthquake sends waves through the ground that a hanging weight will feel before your legs do.

212

When Europeans reached the Pacific, they found people living on specks of land separated by thousands of kilometers of open water, and it blew their minds.

213

They didn't have any compasses, maps, not even like metal or anything.

214

The island dwellers said that their ancestors crossed the distances just by using their memories.

215

The official answer until the 1960s was impossible.

216

They must have drifted there by accident.

217

Storms flew them around and they got lucky.

218

But the islanders kept explaining.

219

They said that they had navigators who were trained from childhood to steer by stars, by birds, by the color of clouds over land.

220

And this is the part I love.

221

By lying down in the bottom of the canoe and just feeling the waves.

222

As waves hit land, the land bends the ocean around its shape, and apparently, a trained navigator can feel islands beyond the horizon through his back.

223

So in 1976, a crew built a traditional double-held canoe called the Hokula, and sent out to figure it out for themselves.

224

Hawaii to Tahiti, like 4,000 kilometers of open Pacific, guided by a navigator.

225

He was from a Micronesian island a couple kilometers wide, and one of the last men alive who'd had the skill.

226

He had a mental map in his head of where more than the hundred stars rose and sat, and he stayed on watch for basically a month straight at sea.

227

Zero instruments on board.

228

No compass, no charts, no little arrow on a screen telling him when to turn.

229

Just vibes.

230

And 33 days later, they hit Tahiti bang on, and half the island was waiting on the beach screaming.

231

So yeah, the drift theory died.

232

The greatest navigators in human history were these guys.

233

Anyway, if you liked this video, you'll like this one even more.

234

Subscribe,

Phương Pháp Shadowing Là Gì?

Shadowing là kỹ thuật học ngôn ngữ có cơ sở khoa học, ban đầu được phát triển cho chương trình đào tạo phiên dịch viên chuyên nghiệp và được phổ biến rộng rãi bởi nhà đa ngôn ngữ học Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Nguyên lý cốt lõi đơn giản nhưng cực kỳ hiệu quả: bạn nghe tiếng Anh của người bản xứ và lặp lại to ngay lập tức — như một "cái bóng" (shadow) đuổi theo người nói với độ trễ chỉ 1–2 giây. Khác với luyện ngữ pháp hay học từ vựng bị động, Shadowing buộc não bộ và cơ miệng phải đồng thời xử lý và tái tạo ngôn ngữ thực tế. Các nghiên cứu khoa học xác nhận phương pháp này cải thiện đáng kể phát âm, ngữ điệu, nhịp điệu, nối âm, kỹ năng nghe và độ lưu loát khi nói — đặc biệt hiệu quả cho người luyện IELTS Speaking và muốn giao tiếp tiếng Anh tự nhiên như người bản ngữ.

Luyện nói tiếng Anh bằng Shadowing qua video: Historical Myths That Turned Out To Be Real

Những Kỹ Năng Bạn Sẽ Học Được

Nghe Những Âm Thanh Này

Nói Như Một Người Bản Xứ

Phương Pháp Shadowing Là Gì?