Shadowing practice: The Real Eric Goldberg - The Goldbergs

This clip is an American accent training exercise disguised as a talk show bit: the real Eric Goldberg, the man Erica from The Goldbergs is based on, gets asked whether the show's wildest stories actually happened to him. It runs at 252 words per minute, faster than 94% of the catalogue, so the words arrive close together and your mouth has to keep up.

The level is B1. That does not mean easy, it means the vocabulary is ordinary even though the delivery is quick. Two voices trade lines fast, an interviewer asking and Eric answering, which makes this useful english speaking practice for anyone who wants to sound natural in a back and forth rather than reciting a monologue.

Line 4, "I have plausible deniability," is a compact, slightly formal phrase dropped into a casual answer, and the fun is in the contrast: dry legal wording used to dodge an embarrassing question. Line 17, "I made a fake ID with my computer and a laminator," is flat and matter of fact, no reduced forms measured in this recording, so every word lands clearly and there is nowhere to hide a lazy consonant.

The longest line in the clip, line 11, packs three separate events into one breath: sneaking off, a car rolling over, and a father's reaction. That is the everyday english rhythm worth studying here, a speaker adding clause after clause without a pause.

• "I have plausible deniability." Practise the stress on "plausible", it carries the joke.
• "Did you ever sneak off to the Poconos and wreck your dad's car?" Two stressed verbs, "sneak off" and "wreck", close together.
• "I did sneak off in college with my girlfriend, and the car rolled over, and my dad did have a cow at the end when he saw the car with" Say it as one continuous run, the way it was said.

Work the 24 lines in order rather than jumping around. The dialogue has a question, answer, question, answer shape, so shadowing it teaches you to speak english fluently in the kind of exchange you actually have with people, not a lecture.

• Start with line 1, "I am here with the real Eric Goldberg." It is short and sets the pace before it speeds up.
• Isolate line 4, "I have plausible deniability," and repeat it five times before moving on, this is the line most people slow down for.
• Take lines 10 and 11 as one unit, the question and its long answer, since the answer only makes sense as a reply to the question.
• Loop line 12, "the roof brushed in," on its own, the word "brushed" is easy to swallow at this pace.
• Finish on lines 17 and 18 about the fake ID, two short factual statements that are a good check on whether you can keep clear consonants at speed.
• Once you can shadow this line without falling behind on any of the five above, run the full 24 lines back to back and time yourself against the 252 words per minute pace.