Shadowing practice: TURNING ME INTO AN LA GIRL FT. JAMES CHARLES & THE DOLAN TWINS

This clip is english speaking practice built from a real, unscripted conversation, not a scripted scene. Emma Chamberlain has just moved to LA and films a getting ready video with James Charles and the Dolan twins, who talk over each other, react, and tease one another in real time. It sits at B2, and moves at 175 words per minute, faster than 40 percent of the catalogue, so lines come quickly and voices frequently interrupt each other.

Four American voices in one recording means four rhythms, which makes this good american accent training: you hear a fast reactive interjection sitting right next to a slower explanatory sentence from the same group, in the same minute. Across 301 lines the register stays casual throughout, closer to how friends actually talk than to any textbook dialogue, which is exactly the kind of everyday english a learner needs to get used to hearing at speed.

Most of the reduced forms in this recording are gonna, with a couple of wanna, and they tend to show up buried inside long run on sentences rather than in short punchy ones, which is part of what makes them worth slowing down for.

• "So I have some locals, I wonder if you see or that, that are gonna help me fit in to LA and just make me feel at home." strings several clauses together before the gonna even lands, so the reduction sits mid sentence instead of on a stressed word.
• "Oh my God, it's gonna pop and then I'm gonna sleep on the ground." gives two gonna reductions back to back, and the second one flattens out even more than the first as the line speeds up.
• "Anything else you wanna say?" is a short direct question where wanna carries almost all the stress, a good line to isolate for that reduction on its own.
• "We were all Emma's age and maybe even a little younger when we first moved here." is a slower, explanatory line from one of the Dolan twins, with no reduction at all, and it is worth hearing right after the reactive lines around it for the contrast in pace.

Work this clip in short passes rather than end to end. The overlapping voices make it hard to track more than a few lines at a time, and each of the lines below is worth repeating on its own before you try to speak english fluently through a longer stretch of the scene.

• Start on line one, "Dude, this is weird having people watch me do this." to get the flat, offhand delivery before the pace picks up.
• Shadow line sixteen next, the long locals line, slowly at first, since it runs several clauses together before the gonna appears near the end.
• Isolate line eighteen and repeat the two gonna reductions back to back until your second one sounds as flat as the recording's.
• Compare that against line thirty four, the Dolan twin's slower explanatory line, to hear the difference between reactive and explanatory pacing inside the same conversation.
• Finish on line forty five, "Anything else you wanna say?" as a short question to practice on its own before moving further into the clip.