Shadowing practice: This is your reminder that rent is due on Sunday. #Workaholics

This is english speaking practice on comedy dialogue, not on a narrator reading a prepared text. It is a Comedy Central Stand-Up clip from Workaholics: three flatmates react to a message from their landlord, and the whole 14 lines are them talking each other out of paying. The voices are american, the level is C1, and the pace is 142 words per minute, faster than 14 percent of our catalogue.

What makes it hard is not vocabulary, it is delivery. Nobody waits for a turn. A line starts as a defence, becomes a joke, and is interrupted by the next man before it lands. "Just got a crazy harsh email from Dell the landlord" is said in one breath, with the stress on crazy harsh and almost nothing on the words around it. That flattening is what everyday english sounds like between friends, and it is the part learners rarely get to rehearse.

Use these three lines for american accent training, because each one hides something a textbook sentence would not show you.

• "so what rents always late" is the whole excuse in five words. So what carries the shrug, then the pitch drops and the rest is thrown away. Say it slowly and it stops being an excuse and becomes a question.
• "It's like our signature move" is the running joke of the scene. It's like is one beat, not three words, and our takes the stress. Copy the timing before you copy the sounds.
• "do not try inviting me over to crush a 30 pack" is the landlord being quoted, so the voice changes: slower, every word given equal weight, mock formal. Contrast it with the same speaker's normal rhythm two lines earlier.
• "I gotta make it simple with the big bucks, baby" gives you the one reduced form measured in this recording, gotta. It is unstressed and short, closer to a swallowed guh-ta than to got to.

Shadow this line first and leave the rest alone: line 3. It is short, it is clean, and it is the one line here that is not shouted over. Get the timing of it right and the faster lines stop feeling random.

• Play line 1 twice without speaking. Mark where the speaker breathes. There is one break in it, not three.
• Repeat "It's like our signature move" five times at the recording's own speed. Do not slow it down. A line you repeat five times beats a clip you played once.
• Move to the quoted landlord line and deliberately overdo the change of voice. If your version sounds identical to the lines around it, you have missed what the joke is doing.
• Take "I gotta make it simple with the big bucks, baby" last. Check the score on gotta specifically, then on baby, where the second syllable almost disappears.
• Come back to the same four lines tomorrow. Daily practice on a small set is how conversation pace becomes yours, and it is how you improve your english accent on real speech rather than on drills.