Shadowing practice: Family Guy: Road To The Multiverse (Clip) | TBS

This clip drops Peter and Brian into two different animated worlds inside one scene: first a saccharine Disney parody, then the Robot Chicken universe. It runs at 228 words per minute, faster than most of the catalogue, and sits at B1, so you get real conversational speed without vocabulary that stops you cold. There are 62 lines in total, several of them just a word or two, which makes it a good clip for building raw speed rather than working through long sentences.

The comedy depends on a hard tone switch: sugary and sung one moment, flat and deadpan the next when Brian says "We're in the robot chicken universe." Practising that switch is real English speaking practice for daily use, because ordinary conversation moves between registers almost as fast, even when the content here is absurd on purpose.

Three lines carry most of the interest here, and each rewards a different kind of attention when you shadow this line by line.

• "It's a wonderful day for pie." repeats five times in a row as the song builds. Sung lines exaggerate stress and vowel length, so looping this one is a fast way to hear where English speaking practice usually skips over pitch.
• "Look how gaily we run!" is a short exclamation on a rising note. The word gaily is dated and only shows up in this kind of parody, worth noting even though you will rarely say it yourself.
• "How's it feel to be on a major network for 30 seconds?" is the longest line in the stretch and the pace change is the point: it lands flat and fast right after the sung section, which is where speak English fluently really gets tested.
• "Gosh, it's pretty intoxicating, isn't it?" ends on a tag question. Getting the rise on "isn't it" right is a small, specific way to improve your English accent on questions that are not really questions.

Work in the order the scene gives you, not by difficulty. The jump between the two universes is the natural break point.

• Start with line 1, "What the hell?", a two word line you can repeat until the stress and vowel are automatic before anything harder.
• Loop the pie song, lines 9 to 15, on "It's a wonderful day for pie." Say it five times back to back, matching a slightly different energy each time the way the transcript repeats it.
• Slow down "How's it feel to be on a major network for 30 seconds?" and break it into two chunks at "major network" before trying it at full speed.
• Close on "We're in the robot chicken universe." and aim for the flat delivery, the opposite of the singing that came before it, so you feel the contrast rather than just reading about it.