Shadowing practice: Trump to Attend NBA Finals in NY, We've Got a Raccoon on the Loose & Guillermo at NBA Media Day

This clip is a Jimmy Kimmel Live segment built around game two of the NBA finals between the Spurs and the Knicks. Kimmel opens with a mock postgame report from Hollywood, then the segment cuts to interviews with fans outside the arenas in New York and San Antonio. That mix, a scripted host monologue followed by loud, unscripted crowd reactions, is exactly the range you want if you are building english speaking practice around real American speech rather than a single flat register.

The recording sits at B2 and runs at 215 words per minute, faster than 74 percent of the catalogue, so the host segments move quickly and the crowd lines come in short, overlapping bursts. The accent throughout is American, and Kimmel's own delivery is a solid target for american accent training because he switches between a dry, deadpan anchor voice for the report and a louder, more animated voice for the fan reactions, giving you two distinct deliveries inside one clip.

Pronunciation here is carried as much by volume and rhythm as by individual sounds, since most of these lines come from a crowd shouting outside the arena rather than one speaker at a microphone.

• "Let's go Knicks!" is repeated three times back to back by the crowd, so the stress falls hard on "go" and "Knicks", and copying that repetition is a fast way to feel the beat of an English chant rather than reading it flat.
• "Knicks in four, baby!" drops the verb entirely as a fan predicts the series will end in four games, and the tag "baby" at the end is thrown away quickly with almost no stress, a different rhythm from the stressed words before it.
• "My God, calm down." is Kimmel's own aside about the excited fans, with the two word command "calm down" landing as one quick unit, worth practising on its own before attaching it to the rest of the sentence.
• Later in the clip the host also uses the reduced forms gonna and gotta, so once these opening lines feel comfortable, listen for how those contractions get swallowed in fast American speech.

Work through this clip in the order the scene actually escalates, from Kimmel's calm scripted report to the chaos of the crowd, rather than jumping around. This kind of scene, two or more speakers overlapping in unscripted reactions, is closer to everyday english than a single clean read, which is why it works well for english shadowing practice.

• Start with line 5, "You're watching a special Friday night edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live.", at Kimmel's steady anchor pace before the crowd noise begins.
• Move to the long postgame report sentence in line 4 and split it into two breaths so you keep pace with 215 words per minute without rushing the ending.
• Shadow the three repeated chants of "Let's go Knicks!" together, matching the crowd's rising energy instead of saying each one the same way.
• Isolate "Knicks in four, baby!" on its own, since the missing verb and the thrown away "baby" are the hardest part of the line to reproduce at speed.
• Finish on Kimmel's aside "My God, calm down.", said back at anchor pace, to feel how the segment drops out of the crowd noise and back into the scripted voice.