Shadowing practice: Family Guy: The First Chicken Fight (Clip) | TBS

This clip gives you english speaking practice built around a short, cartoon fight scene from Family Guy: a giant chicken offers a coupon, the man turns it down, saying "Not after last time.", and the argument explodes into a string of short exclamations. It is rated A2 and runs at 184 words per minute across 39 lines, faster than most of the catalogue, so it trains your mouth to keep up with quick, casual american speech.

The voice acting leans into a loud, exaggerated american accent, but the setup lines before the fighting starts use plain, complete sentences with no slang, which is why an A2 learner can follow the whole scene without getting lost. It is a small piece of american accent training disguised as a joke about an expired coupon.

The first minute of this clip is calmer than the rest, and those are the lines to shadow this line by line before the yelling takes over.

• "Well, looks like someone's going to a big party tonight." says the full "going to", not a shortened form, so practise hitting both words at speed instead of skipping past them.
• "I don't take coupons from giant chickens." carries the contraction "don't" and a falling stress on "giant chickens", the two words that carry the joke.
• "This has expired." is three flat words with the pitch dropping on "expired", the sound of a clerk delivering bad news without any drama.
• "Is that going to give us enough time to cross -check the..." is the longest line in the clip and gets cut off mid word by the next fight noise, which is exactly how interrupted speech sounds in real conversation.

Treat the setup and the fight as two separate drills rather than one long clip, since they train different things.

• Start with lines 1 to 3, "Well, looks like someone's going to a big party tonight.", "You should pick up a chicken strip party pack for all your friends.", "Here's a coupon.", said slowly enough to keep every word clear.
• Repeat line 5, "I don't take coupons from giant chickens.", five or six times until the stress lands on "giant chickens" and not on "coupons".
• Say line 9, "This has expired.", with a flat, falling tone, no rise at the end, the way you would deliver a final verdict.
• Run through lines 12 to 31 fast, the block of single word "Ah!" lines, using them only to match the pace and rhythm of the fight, not for vocabulary.
• Slow right down for line 34, "Is that going to give us enough time to cross -check the...", the clip's one genuinely complex sentence, and repeat it until the phrasing feels automatic rather than read aloud.
• Finish on line 37, "Give me a bad coupon.", a short, clean line to end the session on once the rest feels solid.