Shadowing practice: The Michel Thomas Method

This clip is a two person exchange from the podcast Modern Wisdom, where the host and a guest argue about how adults learn languages. It sits at C1 level and runs at 191 words per minute, faster than 53% of the clips in the catalogue, so the guest keeps going for several clauses before either speaker takes a breath.

The accent is British, and the guest answers in the loose, self correcting shape of real talk rather than a written script: he starts a sentence about the Michel Thomas method, folds in a biography, and only lands the point a few lines later. That makes it solid material for english speaking practice, because you are repeating an answer someone actually gave under pressure, not a line built for learners.

Three lines from the transcript are worth slowing down on before you try to speak them at full speed.

• "There's a method called the Michelle Thomas method, and Michelle Thomas mail was Holocaust survivor then became an intelligence officer, ended up speaking five or six different languages and developed" runs as one breath with no grammatical pause, so practising it forces you to plan where you can actually breathe without breaking the sentence.
• "a method of getting people up to basic conversational fluency in a week." carries the sentence's whole point on three stressed words, basic, conversational, fluency, said back to back with barely a gap between them.
• "The reason that people mistakenly believe that kids learn faster is because the kids have no choice." leans on "mistakenly", said with extra weight because the speaker is correcting a common assumption, a useful pattern for anyone working on how to speak english fluently in an argument rather than a monologue.
• The one word question "Why?" is worth noticing too: on the page it looks flat, but said aloud it carries a sharp rise that pulls the whole next answer out of the guest.

Work the thirteen lines in this order rather than start to end.

• Start with line 2, "Why?". It is short enough to copy the pitch exactly, and getting the rise right sets up the intonation you need for the rest of the clip.
• Move to line 4, "a method of getting people up to basic conversational fluency in a week." Say it slowly first, then at the clip's own pace, watching the app's scored line for which of the three stressed words you are flattening.
• Take line 3 next and only that one. It is the longest sentence in the clip, so shadow it in two halves, splitting after "Holocaust survivor", before you try it whole.
• Finish on line 9, "The reason that people mistakenly believe that kids learn faster is because the kids have no choice." This is the clip's actual argument, so once you can say it at full speed with the stress on "mistakenly" landing where the guest puts it, you have the core of a british english pronunciation practice session, not just a read through.
• Loop lines 9 through 13 together once you can do them separately. They build one argument, kids have no mortgage, no job, no choice, and saying them back to back is closer to how the guest actually delivers the point than any single line on its own.