Shadowing practice: Trump Threatens Late Night TV Again, Might Be Upset We Won a Peabody & His Suspicious Health Report

This clip is Jimmy Kimmel opening his show on primary election night, talking straight to camera about the LA mayoral race. It sits at B2, and it moves at 192 words per minute, faster than 54 percent of the catalogue, so it is a solid test for english speaking practice once you already know the words. The accent is American, delivered in the loose, joke timed cadence of a late night host rather than a scripted news read.

What is actually happening is simple. Kimmel runs through California's jungle primary system, then spends most of the clip on one candidate, Spencer Pratt, a reality TV figure running for mayor of LA. The topic stays concrete and the sentences are mostly short, which makes this a fair line for american accent training before you move on to faster or denser interview material. There is no dense vocabulary to fight through here, so the work is entirely about matching the timing and the attitude in his voice, not looking up words.

A few lines here carry more than they look like on the page.

• "Remember when we only had three channels and it would be Saturday night?" This rhetorical question opens the whole bit and sets up the nostalgia joke that follows. Practice the rise on "channels" and the drop on "Saturday night" before you move past it.
• "I will leave LA if I don't win." Kimmel is quoting Spencer Pratt inside his own sentence and flattens his voice to mark the shift from narrator to quote. Shadow that flat delivery, it is the setup for the joke that follows a beat later.
• "if your canoe is sinking and you thought it might help to add a rattlesnake" is one long image with no pause in the middle. Say it in a single breath the way Kimmel does. Matching stress across a clause this long, rather than chopping it into pieces, is where you actually improve your english accent.

Work through the opening in the order it was said, it builds one bit at a time, and each stretch below is short enough to loop several times in one sitting.

• Start with lines 1 to 6, the plain audience address, before the jokes begin. It is flat, evenly paced American speech, good for locking in rhythm first without any punchline timing to worry about.
• Loop line 7, "Remember when we only had three channels and it would be Saturday night?", on its own until the question shape feels automatic.
• Take lines 16 to 21 together, where Spencer Pratt is introduced and then quoted directly in "I will leave LA if I don't win." A name and a nested quote land in one sentence here, worth slowing down for.
• Finish on line 27, the canoe and rattlesnake line, saying it in one continuous breath to match Kimmel's pacing before you move on to the rest of the clip.