Shadowing practice: Tom Holland Zendaya and Jacob Batalon Answer the Web's Most Searched Questions - WIRED

This is a WIRED autocomplete interview: Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jacob Batalon answer real Google search questions about themselves, back to back, with no script to fall behind. The level is B1 and the pace sits at 115 words per minute, faster than almost every other clip in the catalogue, so this is a clip for a learner who already has some speaking practice behind them and wants american accent training at real conversational speed, not a slowed down lesson recording.

What makes it worth the extra effort is that the three of them talk over each other and finish each other's sentences the way friends do. Tom Holland explains his stunt work, gets asked whether he spoils his own movies, and names Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away as a favourite film, all inside a few fast lines. Jacob Batalon corrects a guess about his background mid sentence. None of it is delivered for a textbook, which is exactly why it is useful for anyone trying to improve your english accent on real speech rather than staged dialogue.

Read the lines before you shadow this line by line, because several of them run two thoughts together with no pause, which is exactly how this kind of unscripted answer actually sounds. The brief for this recording counts "gonna" five times across the full clip, a reduction worth listening for as you go.

• "I do do my own stunts, but I can't take full credit" doubles the verb do do the way speech does when someone is thinking and talking at once, and then pivots with but mid breath rather than starting a new sentence.
• "I was born and raised in Hawaii though." ends on though tacked on at the end, a spoken habit for softening a statement that almost never appears in written English.
• "Run out of web." is four words, clipped and fast, with the article dropped the way real answers get shortened under time pressure.

Treat this as daily english conversation practice for a stretch of real, overlapping speech, not a single smooth paragraph to imitate once. Work through it in order.

• Play the opening lines once through without pausing, just to get the pace of a B1 interview moving at 115 words per minute into your ear before you try to speak any of it yourself.
• Isolate "I do do my own stunts, but I can't take full credit" and repeat it until the doubled do do and the mid line but stop tripping you up.
• Take "I was born and raised in Hawaii though." on its own and practise landing the stress on Hawaii with though trailing off quietly after it.
• Shadow "Run out of web." a few times back to back. Four words said fast is a good gauge of whether your speaking practice is keeping pace with a native speaker or lagging behind it.
• Go back through the whole opening stretch once more at full speed, aiming to keep up with the overlap rather than waiting for a gap.