How to Improve Spoken American English - Sound like a Native Speaker

A lot of people ask me if it's possible to sound like a native speaker if you weren't

born in the US. They want to know how long it will take. That, of course, depends entirely

upon the individual. Really focused pronunciation practice can yield great results. In this

video, I'm going to go over two different ways to study English to perfect your pronunciation.

All you need is the audio or video of a native speaker speaking.

First, we're going to do a Ben Franklin exercise. This is when you write down everything you

can about what you hear: whether or not you hear words being linked, or if you hear something

being reduced, for example. Now, we'll do this together to help you get

an idea of how to listen to and analyze what you hear. "A lot of people ask me if it's

possible to sound like a native speaker-- A lot of people ask me." So the first thing

I notice is that this T is a flap T, it sounds like a D, "a lot of," that's because it's

coming between two vowel sounds. I also notice that I hear these three words as one unit:

"a lot of, a lot of," with the stress happening on the middle word. "A lot of, a lot of people