How to get a Better English accent 👄 Pronunciation Practice Every Day!

Hello I'm Emma from mmmEnglish!

In this video,

I'm hoping I can convince you that you should

practise your English pronunciation every day

and it's easier than you think.

I want to give you some simple ideas to help you make

daily pronunciation practice

just a regular part of your routine.

So let's get into it!

The chances are, you're watching this video because

you want to work on your English accent,

which means that there is something about it

that frustrates you.

So firstly, I want you to tell me about it.

Tell me about what

makes you feel frustrated about your accent?

Tell me in the comments below the video.

I know what this is like, people misunderstanding you

because you're not making the right sounds

or even just feeling like

that's not how it's supposed to sound.

Why am I so awkward?

You know it's not smooth, it's not easy to talk to people

and so your English conversations

never really last that long.

It's hard to fit in, you know, and as you

start using English at work you realise

my accent sucks.

You feel like people aren't taking you seriously.

You don't get invited to social functions

and you start feeling really crap about yourself.

I know this because these are the same pains

that so many of my students go through.

Changing your accent helps you to feel accepted.

It helps you to fit in and even excel with

whatever you want to do. It takes years of work,

of specific and deliberate training to first

try to hear and recognise the sounds and then start

making them yourself.

I mean you've probably been speaking English

with your accent for years now, right?

So it's gonna take some effort to break those habits.

Now I think that one of our biggest challenges as adults

is creating regular habits, you know, we're all so busy

with kids and family and work and travel

and all of the extra stress that goes with that stuff.

You know it's incredibly difficult to find the time

to focus on something consistently but

that is exactly what you need to do

if you want to change your accent and make it clearer,

you've got to bring daily pronunciation practice

into your life, right?

I've got three things that I want to share with you today

that I think you should be doing

to improve your pronunciation every day.

The first and really great daily habit

that will help you to improve your pronunciation

is super simple.

Read out loud.

It doesn't matter what you read,

as long as what you're reading is in English

and doing this daily will help you to get

your mouth muscles working and creating the sounds

that you need to use when you speak English.

It really is as simple as that

and it doesn't need to take you long, you know,

five or ten minutes a day is plenty.

That kind of exercise is really easy

to fit into your daily routine, right? No excuses.

Probably the best place to do this is at home,

you know, somewhere where you're not afraid to

project your voice, to push your voice out.

I don't want you to read like this, okay?

I want you to read like this.

You know, practise pushing those sounds

out of your mouth.

You don't need to worry about being perfect,

you know, you're just getting used to

making those sounds and making those sounds

together with other sounds in English.

So reading out loud is a really good way to sort of

stretch and warm up your mouth ready for English.

So it's a good idea to do it before you go to class

or before you have a phone call,

before you have an English meeting,

you know, activate those muscles, train them,

remember what those sounds are

and how to make them.

Reading out loud is an

awesome way to practise your pronunciation.

Speaking of sounds, get to know English sounds

and in particular, the English sounds

that you struggle with. This is a really, really important

place to start, okay?

There are lots of English sounds

that you're totally cool with you know,

but there are probably quite a few that feel unnatural

and they don't really sound right as you speak.

If you don't know what these sounds are for you

then find out. A good place to start is just by

researching the sounds that are

difficult for people who speak your native language.

For French people, it's definitely going to include the

/h/ sound at the start of words.

Hat.

Hero.

Hotel.

For Vietnamese people,

it's going to be final consonants.

Like.

Out.

Behind.

For Arabic speakers,

Indian speakers, for everyone, really,

TH sounds.

This.

That.

These.

Those.

Enthusiasm.

Weather.

Bath.

There are probably five to eight sounds that are

problem sounds for you.

Alright once you've worked out what they are,

make a list of those sounds,

stick them on your bathroom mirror

and practise them every morning out loud,

every day. Just start ironing out the creases.

It's gonna take some time but the fastest way

to correct those sounds is to consistently practise them

If you're unsure if you're pronouncing words correctly,

use an online dictionary to check. Super easy, right?

Drastic.

You probably go to the gym, right?

Or maybe you go for a run to keep fit or swim,

just consider this your pronunciation workout,

your English workout.

You've got to do it regularly to keep fit

and to get stronger and you know think about it,

it hurts a lot if you don't go to the gym for a while,

you know, and then suddenly you're lifting weights

and you're like "Oh this hurts"

If you haven't spoken English in a while,

it hurts, you know, your muscles ache because

they're not used to it but

if you go to the gym regularly, you get fitter,

you can last longer, you're not as sore

after each session.

Gradually you can start to increase the weights, right?

Your tongue is a muscle as well.

It needs to be trained and stretched and twisted

into the positions that English requires.

You are already so awesome at making the sounds

that you need for your native language but

you need to do a little bit of extra work to activate

some of the English sounds that don't exist

in your language. So

a daily tongue workout, a daily mouth workout

is the fastest and the simplest method

to improve your English pronunciation.

Now tongue twisters might seem like a bit of a joke

to you but if you can find a few to help you practise

those difficult sounds of yours,

then doing them a few times daily will help to

strengthen the muscles,

you know, and help you to make those sounds

more easily.

I've got a link to a video I made on tongue twisters

up here. Check it out. Get started there.

But find ones that are relevant for you.

How can a clam cram in a clean cream can?

Six sick hicks nicked six slick

bricks with picks and sticks.

So you've probably noticed that English words,

when they're spoken naturally,

sometimes change.

You know the pronunciation can change as we increase

the speed of our speech. In fact, they often do.

And there are lots of grammatical words that actually

have two forms of pronunciation, a stressed form

and an unstressed form.

Some.

To.

The schwa sound is really important to help you

practise word stress and sentence stress in English.

Studying connected speech is also going to help you

to learn how to do this and to

sound more natural when you speak.

I've got lots of videos about connected speech

and pronunciation up here in this playlist

but these are all really important aspects of

naturally spoken English that you can work on

to help you improve your pronunciation but

you can't practise these things while you're just

pronouncing English words individually.

They have to be part of a sentence

so how can you do that?

You need some controlled practice and imitating

a native speaker is a fantastic way to do this.

You may already know that I've created a whole course

of videos around how to imitate a native speaker

with lots of practice.

You know, in these lessons I help you to copy

and then shadow me as I speak. They're really awesome

quick ten minute videos that you can practise

your pronunciation with.

There are a few on my channel already

but if you'd like to support mmmEnglish

and purchase my imitation courses

well you can do that right up here.

Then you'll have lots of different videos to practise with,

lots of natural phrases and expressions to learn.

So what am I going to say next?

Daily habit. That's right! Okay?

Get into the habit of practising

with one lesson every day,

that's just ten more minutes of pronunciation practice

every day alright?

In the lessons, I'll show you how to shadow

a native speaker

and this allows you to practise the rhythm, the pace,

the pause, the intonation that's used

and this technique is something that you can

start practising with any video.

It doesn't have to be my lessons,

you can choose whatever video,

whatever native speaker you want to shadow.

Whatever you choose, I'd focus on one lesson

or one video every day for a whole week okay.

So give yourself the time to go over and review,

build confidence with it, right?

Once you've done that make a recording of yourself

and compare it to the original.

Listen to yourself and try to identify

what you're doing wrong, what are the sounds

that you're not quite getting?

I've added the link to my imitation course

below in the description

and I'll also add one of the ones from my channel

at the end of this video, okay?

In a video a couple of weeks ago, I said that with

language practice, it's easier to create a habit once you

attach it to another activity.

You know, like for me, I always listen to an audiobook

while I go for a run.

You might say "Okay

I'll practise my pronunciation every morning

after I brush my teeth."

Or I'll read out loud for ten minutes

every night before I go to bed.

So attach it to an activity,

help it to become a regular part of your routine.

Changing your pronunciation is gonna take time

so you must make it happen regularly, you know,

you've got to create that daily habit and you've got to

do it every day for a year which seems like forever

but time flies if you get started today

and you do it every day, you'll be speaking clearly

and confidently before you know it.

I hope you enjoyed this lesson and you found it useful.

If you did,

make sure you let me know in the comments below.

You can find me on social media over here

and as promised here's one of my imitation lessons

so that you can take it right now and practise.

Hit the subscribe button if you haven't done that already

and I'll see you in there!