Improving my pronunciation

I have been learning English for over ten years now and I feel pretty confident when I’m talking to native speakers. However, even though I know that I can hold a conversation without stuttering and my vocabulary is improving on a daily basis, I know that my pronunciation isn’t perfect and I’m not completely fluid yet. I’m studying English, so obviously my goal is to get as close to a natural English accent as possible.

To start off, I need to ‘pick’ the English I want to speak. It’s not very authentic if I’m pronouncing a few words the British way but speak an American accent the rest of the time. To sound a little more like a native speaker I have to settle on one accent I want to use and then I can start to perfect it. I’m aiming for an American accent because quite frankly I think it’ll be easier for me to learn. Most of the English I’m confronted with in daily life (first and foremost TV-series and most English books I read) is American English and that’s why it seems more natural for me to use it as well.

Now, to actively improve my pronunciation I have to know where to start. If I encounter a certain word I don’t know how to pronounce I’ll just look it up in a monolingual dictionary or websites that focus on pronunciation like howjsay.com. However, it’s not only important to look up the pronunciation of words I randomly come across, but also to practice the rest of the time. It’s essential to listen to native speakers in order to hear their way of speaking: not only their pronunciation, but also their intonation and how they stress certain words and parts of sentences. That means that videos and other audio sources are the best ways to improve pronunciation.

And that’s why in my opinion youtube is a great source to improve all these different parts. First of all youtube offers millions of videos of native speakers talking about random stuff in a casual environment, which means that I can listen to them talk like they usually talk in daily life. But even more important are the videos of natives that talk specifically about how to get an authentic English accent, or the differences between various English accents.

Obviously there are thousands of these videos online, so it can be a bit difficult to find the ones that are really helpful and trustworthy or focus on academic and more formal vocabulary – many British vs. American English videos focus on slang and even though they are funny to watch, they aren’t the kind of videos I’m looking for when I want to improve my pronunciation. So at the beginning I looked over the pronunciation page from our English course and I watched a few of the videos that were linked there.

One youtube channel I immediately liked was Rachel’s English. First of all she teaches American pronunciation which I want to focus on and second of all her videos are very detailed. For starters she has videos that concentrate on all the basic English sounds, others are about the pronunciation of important words such as ‘them’ or ‘that’, and there is a section about idioms and one about conversational American English.

I find her videos entertaining and at the same time very useful to improve my pronunciation. I especially like the section that explains detailed how to pronounce certain sounds, for example different ‘t’ and ‘th’ sounds. I know that I still have some problems with these sounds, so this section helps me a lot. 

Besides Rachel’s videos, I also watched a few of Amy Walker’s youtube videos and really liked them. I enjoy listening to her and think she explains essential parts of the American accent easily understandable.

Usually I watch videos and repeat after the speakers. I try to hear the difference between my pronunciation and theirs and to repeat as often as possible until I’m close to the right way of pronouncing the sound. I also revise the sounds I have more problems with after a few days again.