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Shadowing practice: Where did all my friends go? Watch this | Mel Robbins #Shorts

Listen to the line, then say it out loud
Line 1

Full transcript

  1. I thought by the time I was 54 years old, my life would be a party.0:00
  2. There would be barbecues every weekend.0:04
  3. We'd be going on cruises and bike trips with friends.0:06
  4. I'd have all kinds of downtime to hang out with my buddies.0:09
  5. What the hell has happened?0:12
  6. This is how I would describe adult friendship, at least for Mel Robbins.0:14
  7. And I'm sure you can relate to this.0:17
  8. Bumping into people randomly and being like, oh my God, it's so great to see you.0:18
  9. We should get together.0:22
  10. And then six months go by.0:23
  11. I think my circle has gotten so small, it's basically become a dot.0:25
  12. Here's the thing I keep reminding myself, and I want to put this pin in it too for you.0:28
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  1. You ready?0:32
  2. You're friends and you actually mean it when you say we should get together.0:33
  3. But there's something that's standing in the way of us actually doing it.0:37
  4. And I'm gonna tell you what it is.0:41
  5. It's these five damn lies.0:42
  6. These lies that keep you feeling lonely and isolated.0:43
  7. These lies that make you feel that adult friendship is hard.0:46
  8. Lie number one that you're telling yourself.0:49

Mel Robbins on adult friendship: a fast, American podcast clip for B2 speaking practice

This clip works well for english speaking practice because Mel Robbins talks about adult friendship at 257 words per minute, faster than 96% of the catalogue. It is rated B2, so the vocabulary is not simple, but the sentences stay short and conversational, which keeps the fast pace manageable.

The clip is closer to a confession than a lecture. She lists what she expected from her fifties, barbecues, cruises, bike trips, then flips into a rhetorical question and a countdown of five lies about friendship. That shift from wistful to blunt inside a few seconds is good american accent training: you get relaxed narration and a sharper, faster delivery in the same short recording.

The language in this clip: one reduction and a string of rare words

Three lines are worth slowing down for.

Repeating these out loud is a direct way to improve your english accent, since the reduction and the casual reporting verb below never show up in written English.

  • "We'd be going on cruises and bike trips with friends." The contraction "We'd" and the quick list after it are said as one breath group, not three separate items.
  • "Bumping into people randomly and being like, oh my God, it's so great to see you." "Bumping into" and "randomly" are two of the clip's rare words, and "being like" is the casual way she reports what she felt in the moment.
  • "And I'm gonna tell you what it is." The only reduced form in this recording, gonna, is said quickly before the stressed word "tell".

How to shadow this Mel Robbins clip, line by line

The clip runs twenty lines, so work it in three passes rather than trying to match the full speed at once.

This kind of shadowing english speaking practice b2 pairs naturally with english listening practice, since you train your ear on the fast stretch and your mouth on the short one in the same clip.

  • Listen to lines 1 to 4 once without speaking, just to catch the rhythm of the list: barbecues, cruises, bike trips, downtime.
  • Shadow line 5, "What the hell has happened?", on its own a few times. It is short, so use it to lock the stress pattern before moving on.
  • Slow line 8 down and repeat "Bumping into people randomly and being like, oh my God, it's so great to see you." until the two rare words land clearly.
  • Isolate line 16, "And I'm gonna tell you what it is.", and say it five times to get comfortable with the reduction.
  • Finish by running lines 17 to 20 at full pace, since that is where the clip picks up momentum into the list of five lies.
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