Mirroring vs shadowing: what's the difference?

Shadowing copies the sound: you echo a recording's words, rhythm and intonation almost in real time. Mirroring copies the whole performance: the speaker's facial expressions, gestures and body language too, as if you were acting the part. Shadowing is the practical daily audio drill. Mirroring is a more intense, usually in-person style some coaches use for accent and delivery.

In practice, shadowing needs nothing but clean audio and your voice. You play a clip, trail a beat behind, and match how it sounds. Mirroring, as accent coaches use the term, adds the visible half of speech: you watch a speaker on video and copy their mouth, posture and hand movements along with the sound, on the theory that the way natives move shapes the way they sound.

Worth being honest: the two words get used loosely, and some people treat them as the same thing. There's no official standard, and shadowing itself gets split into different types depending on who's describing it. Either way, for everyday learning, audio shadowing gives you most of the gain for a fraction of the effort.