4 Best Ways to Improve Your English Pronunciation

Okay, let's do this. Hi everybody. Welcome back to my channel. Today we're going to talk about four best ways to work on your English pronunciation. I started learning English from a young age, but I didn't develop a good accent until I was much older. So these are the things that I learned together with my students, pretty much. So the reason why I'm so passionate about pronunciation and your accent in English is because I didn't get too much information on how to do it, what are the best ways to do it, what works, what doesn't work when I was in school. And I also didn't really know how important it was to have a good pronunciation and to be clear when you speak. Our teacher back in Moldova was not a native speaker. She was from Ukraine, so she did have quite a thick accent. But it didn't really matter to us because we were kids and we just looked at English as another subject, you know, another thing that I have to do homework for. However, I was a little bit more passionate about English than my other classmates and I was watching some shows on TV and some movies and I was listening to some American music on the side when I was at home. So I could kind of compare that whatever I would hear at school didn't really match to whatever I was seeing on TV. So obviously, because I thought, well, these people are from the US, right, there were American movies, American music, I will just repeat after them and I will imitate them and not my teacher because, you know, she's not that credible or whatever. And it was fine because she was teaching us grammar, we were reading a lot, you know, we were learning English, we were studying English, but then on the side at home, I would just listen to English and try to imitate the pronunciation I would hear on TV. Okay, so method number one would be shadowing. I talk about shadowing on all my social platforms. I'm sure you've heard me talk about it before. And shadowing is just, you know, the umbrella term of repeating, imitating, and just wanting to sound like someone else or trying to sound like someone else. I used to shadow or imitate different people, different actors, right? And when you shadow, what you do is you are just imitating the exact melody, tone, rhythm, and pronunciation that that person is using. And shadowing gives you this crazy, rude awakening of what it means to actually speak English, how fast do you need to actually go, or how slow you need to actually go sometimes. Because when you express thoughts, opinions, ideas, you have a certain melody in your native language, right? Sometimes you make a joke, you have to be really quick. Sometimes you are being empathetic with somebody, you're, I don't know, they're sharing some bad news, you're slowing down, right? You're listening more, you speak a little bit slower, right? When you're anxious, when you're nervous, you want to speak a little bit faster, your brain is just playing that trick on you. So in English is the same thing, you know, other people speak English as their native language just like how you're speaking your native language. So don't feel like English is just a science, a subject that you just learn through books and that's it. It's skills, it's communication, it's personality, it's point of views, it's opinions, it's reactions, it's emotions, feelings, right? So when you shadow, you practically learn a lot more about someone's culture, about how they see things, about how they respond to things, about how they react to things in the moment, how their voice goes up and down. So you get to learn that as well. If you do shadowing consistently, you're going to notice how some sounds become easier for you, how some words become easier for you, and how you start noticing repeated sentences or reactions in people's communication and dialogues. When you're doing shadowing, take a clip from a video, from a podcast, from a TV show, whatever it is. I made a 28-day shadowing playlist, I'm going to put the link over here if you want to check it out. But you basically take a scene out of whatever you want and you want to practice that scene multiple times. If it's difficult for you at first, you do it with subtitles or you listen to it a few times without the shadowing part. Then you go back, you shadow with subtitles, then you go back and you shadow without subtitles, then you go back and you shadow without even looking at the people talking. You know, it's very important that you are okay with repetition. When you're learning how to do something, you have to do that thing multiple times until you get good at it. Speaking pronunciation is a skill, and in order for you to develop that skill, you have to continuously do the same exact thing until you get used to it and you're good at it. The second method is quite simple to explain. Work with a teacher or a dialect coach. Real-time, personalized feedback is the best way to catch those mistakes that you yourself cannot hear. This is a huge part why mistakes stick around for years, even in people who are otherwise fluent. Your own ear gets used to what you're saying and how you're saying it, so in time, you don't even notice that you're saying something wrong, but native speakers will notice it right away. So a teacher or a dialect coach will be able to catch those habits early on and work on them with you so you don't reinforce the same mistakes over time. However, the catch, and I think most people know this, is accessibility. A dialect coach or a teacher can be either hard to find or really expensive, and that's why I recommend Bold Voice, who kindly offered to sponsor this video and support my channel so I'm able to create more content for you. But before I tell you more about how Bold Voice can work on your pronunciation, I want to show you something that they just launched. It's a tool called the Accent Oracle, where you speak for about 30 seconds, and then based on how you speak English, it guesses your native language accent. Okay, let's test my accent. She's super thankful for the birthday flowers, but the vase doesn't fit. Recently, I've started taking short walks in the evenings to clear my mind. Oh my god, I got United States, Canada, and Spain, which is interesting because I have been learning Spanish, and I also speak Romanian, so they're both romance languages, you know, so there's something, something in common there for sure. But the main ones are United States and Canada, which is super accurate. United States 38% and Canada 31%. Our accent patterns can stay consistent and specific even after years of speaking English fluently, so then in time, we don't even know what sounds give us away. You know that usual question you get, where are you from, right after your first sentence? Personally, I know that question very well because I was always confused how native speakers knew that I was not from Canada, because I thought I had a great accent. So the reason I recommend Bold Voice is because it was developed by Hollywood dialect coaches, and once it identifies your pattern, it doesn't just tell you, oh, you have an accent and stop there. It actually helps you improve it. It gives you targeted feedback on your specific sounds, just like a coach would in a real session. Author. Wow, good job. Worf. Let's work on this. Compare my recording to yours and then try again. Worth. Worf. Worth. Awesome. You got it this time. You can also use the Practice My Text tab, where you can rehearse a presentation you have coming up, or some interview questions and answers, or any other text that you're preparing to speak on, so you make sure you say everything correctly. On the content side, we've published three blog posts targeting high-intent keywords, already driving early organic traffic gains. Make sure you say j and not ch. Instead of budget, try to say budget. Budget. Try again with the j sound. Let's start. Tap the button below and say the word. Engagement. Finding a dialect coach who adapts to your schedule, is efficient, and affordable is almost impossible, so you can see why Bold Voice is such a great option. So if you want to give them a try, use the link in the description down below and get 10% off your yearly membership with the code RODICA. Thank you again, Bold Voice, for sponsoring this video and supporting my channel. Method number three. Connected speech. Practice connected speech any time you can. And what connected speech means is words that are connected in speech. When you're reading something, it's very easy to get carried away or distracted by that little space between the words. You think that that gives you an opportunity to stop, or that gives you the right to stop, and that is not the case. When you speak, you don't have that space. You don't see that space. You don't imagine that space. Imagine you're reading something in your native language, and imagine you're speaking in your native language. If you were to read something in your native language, you'd go like this, because you're very used to saying those words, and you know how to connect them. But in a foreign language or in English, if you're learning it, you can kind of see those words and the spaces in between, and you're like, oh, okay, I can be a little slower. I can give myself some time here to pause. No, you should be mimicking the same way you're talking in your native language, but in English. So connected speech comes in a few different options. There are some consonants that kind of connect with vowels. One of them becomes softer. The other one maybe even disappears. There's some other consonants that, you know, together, one of them completely goes away, and the other one becomes a little bit more silent. So there's a few things that happen in connected speech, and I will develop something that will go a little bit more in depth on this topic. But until then, just have the connected speech in mind. So for example, whenever you say... The simplest sentence doesn't have to be anything complicated, right? For example, the expression or the sentence, I'll be right back, okay? If you see it on paper, it will be, I will be right back, or it'll be, I'll be right back. So the main component here for connected speech is the T at the end of right. So when you say, I'll be right back, can you hear the T? I'll be right back, right back, right back. I'll be right back. So it sounds like right back. It doesn't sound like right. So if you're learning English, and you're always, always expecting that words will sound complete, that the ending will be there, every letter will be pronounced, that's not going to happen, unfortunately. So that's why sometimes people say, I can read, I understand everything on a piece of paper or in a book or on screen. But when someone talks, it sounds like one big long word, like, right? Because some words are literally cut in half sometimes. And because you're practicing connected speech on the side, you would get slowly used to the fact that most words are not pronounced fully in English. What do you think about that? What do you think? So it's not what do you think? It's what do you think? What do you think? So that what, that you would learn separately, and you would read what, in this question sounds like what, what do you think? What do you think? That is connected speech. And if you, through shadowing, and working on your pronunciation, and putting it in connected speech, you will get so much more used to how people talk. And in return, you'll understand everything so much better. And you won't be afraid to pronounce those things the same way they do. And you're going to become faster this way, because connected speech makes you faster. It's it, it takes away a couple of consonants, it puts some words together, it meshes them, it shortens some endings there. So you actually start speaking faster. And again, everything here is connected by repetition. You can't just say one word one time, or one sentence one time, and consider it done. It's not done. Your brain has not learned it yet. It's not a skill yet. It's just information. So when you say, what do you think about that? The first time is probably not going to sound the way I said it. What do you think about that? But because I said this sentence so many times in my life, both practicing myself and in speech with my friends and co-workers and whoever else I had the opportunity to talk to in English, and I needed to say, what do you think about that? I've practiced it, right? And now I'm super comfortable. I don't even think about it. See what I did there? It becomes like a little song. What do you think about that? My mouth, my tongue, my brain knows what to do. Trust me, if you follow these methods and you stay consistent and you do them every day, you'll notice such a big difference in your pronunciation and in your flow in general. Okay, and the last but not least method, method number four, is working on your specific sounds. So your native language will most likely not have some sounds that English does and the other way around, or you'll have the tendency to pronounce certain sounds the way they would sound in your native language. A lot of people will struggle with the same sounds, like the th for example, or the r's if they don't exist in their native language. So this is kind of like a common struggle in English, but a lot of other people will struggle with specific sounds like t or v or b or z or s, like so many different sounds that the letters are kind of the same in both languages because maybe they share the same alphabet, but the sounds are completely different. And this method kind of incorporates the other three because you would need to have either a dialect coach or a teacher or an app like bold voice to identify those specific sounds that you need to work on, that you keep having an issue with, because you will notice a pattern. If you don't do that, then when you're shadowing, record yourself. So then compare your recording to the author, to the speaker that you're shadowing, and then see, does this sound the same? And if it doesn't, select the words and find what sound from that word is actually wrong. And a lot of the times you'll have an issue with certain sounds because you're not used to putting them in connected speech. So your speech is very robotic, it's very like chopped up, you know, because you're pausing in between words too much. And nowadays we have so many different tools to use. And you can just ask AI, hey, this is my native language, I'm trying to learn English, what do you think are the sounds that I have the biggest issues with? And it's typically very common for a lot of people from the same maybe country or the same region to have certain issues with certain letters. If you can test your accent out first and then identify those sounds, start working on them while you're doing all the other methods, you're going to notice how English is just becoming easier for you and you'll like what you're hearing. Because a lot of the times people are afraid to record themselves either through a voice note or even video because they don't want to see how they are failing or they're like ashamed or embarrassed or something, right? So it's an uncomfortable feeling, I totally agree with that. However, at the end of the day, you just want to be able to express yourself clearly. And yes, if you want to improve your pronunciation in order to become better at speaking and more confident and be understood and just more coherent, more articulate in general, then these are the methods that will push you further and faster than any other ones. At least in my experience, because this is what helped me, this is what helped my students, and this is something that is truly coming out of practice, not just books or theory. One important thing I want you to remember is that progress won't be noticeable in a day or in a week, okay? Just stay consistent, do it every day, and I highly, highly recommend you record yourself today so then you can compare three months later and say, wow, my pronunciation got so much better. The shadowing playlist I put together goes from slow to faster, so even if you're a beginner, you can still start with week one, practice the same videos over and over again until you're ready to move to week two, and so on. So it doesn't really matter what level you're at, there's always going to be something that you can practice on, and I also added a few channels that you can always find new videos if you get bored of mine. Alright, thank you so much for watching. All the links are in the description down below. Let me know in the comments what is the method that you're using to improve your pronunciation, and what has worked for you the best. Okay, see you in the next one, bye!