Shadowing practice: Learn How To Talk About Your Daily Routine in English

This clip is a spoken lecture: Bob the Canadian talks directly to camera about his own morning, at 198 words per minute, faster than 59 percent of the catalogue. That speed on A2 material is what makes it worth shadowing rather than skimming, the speaker does not slow down for learners, so you get a real target pace instead of a textbook one.

The recording is in an american accent, and across its 105 lines Bob names each action as he performs it: waking up, getting up, making the bed, using the bathroom, making breakfast. Every phrase maps to a visible action, which is unusually concrete for A2 content and gives you a steady way to work on how to pronounce english words in an american accent while you also learn the vocabulary.

Bob does not just narrate, he stops to teach the same idea two different ways, which hands you paired phrases to shadow instead of guessing at synonyms yourself.

• "You can say, I use the bathroom." sits right next to "You can also in Canadian English say, I use the washroom or I go to the washroom.", two accepted phrasings for one action.
• "So after I make breakfast, I eat breakfast." is followed by "You can say I eat breakfast but you can also say I have breakfast.", a clean verb pair worth repeating on its own until both come out equally fast.
• "The very first thing I do every day is I wake up and then I usually press the snooze button" is one long breath group with no pause before the next clause, good practice for speaking english fluently over a full sentence rather than word by word.

Work this clip in order, it is built around one action at a time, so each step below points at the lines where that action changes.

• Start with line 1, "Hi Bob the Canadian here.", just to lock in his pace and accent before the content gets denser.
• Shadow lines 7 and 8 as one unit, the snooze button sentence above, since Bob runs both clauses together without a break.
• Take lines 19 to 21 back to back and repeat "I use the bathroom" then "I use the washroom or I go to the washroom" until both phrasings sit equally naturally in your mouth.
• Do the same with lines 28 to 30, alternating "I eat breakfast" and "I have breakfast" as a pair rather than two separate lines.
• Once workday, snooze, routines and washroom stop tripping you up, run the whole 31 line block again without pausing, checking your pace against Bob's 198 words per minute as you go. This kind of line by line english speaking practice works best on material this concrete.