Hey there, welcome to Every Speaker Counts. I’m Daniela, an English teacher, pronunciation coach, speaking club host, blogger, and a self-described late bloomer. I was born and raised in Bulgaria, but I’ve been living in the United States for many years.
My goal is to give a platform to all of us nonnative speakers to share our stories and learn from each other. Our voices are rarely represented in the media and I want to break the stereotype of the typically portrayed maid with a Spanish accent and a spy or a gold digger with a Russian accent. We are so much more than that.
Here you will find many of my stories and thoughts about my journey with English and life in the US, as well as the stories of other great human beings. You will also find tips about language (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation), and culture – everything that can serve as a motivation to you on your road to fluency. Oh, and you can also become a part of this incredible community by joining our free Speaking Club.
Let’s do this together.
Love,
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In this post I’ll discuss different phases that I’ve noticed English learners go through when they start speaking English. They are based on my personal experience and observation. So, if you are learning English, but feel stuck and shy away from speaking with native speakers, this read is for you. Understanding where you are in […]
I often hear that if your pronunciation in English is clear, your foreign accent doesn’t matter. Then why do I meet so many people whose English is intelligible and fluent, but they still cringe when someone asks where their accent is from? In this post, I’m gonna talk about having a foreign accent in the […]
Hey, welcome to another post about shadowing in English. This time I chose a speaker who is a first-generation Iranian American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist. Her name is Leila Hormozi, and in this particular video that I selected she talks about how she quit her job and started a multi-million-dollar business at a very young […]
In today’s post you will learn how to use the word though in sentences and the several different meanings that it can have depending on how it is used. But before I move on to the different meanings of though, let’s talk about how to pronounce it. Some people are confused because it’s spelled with […]
In this post, you will learn five idioms that Americans use to praise someone for a job well done. Idioms are a type of figurative language where the words put together lose their literal meaning. The problem is that when we study English at school, we learn the literal meaning of words. And when we […]
Today I’m going to talk about something that I’ve been planning to show you for a while because it tremendously helped me to sound more fluent when I was learning English. And this is the shadowing technique. It’s also called imitation. To be honest, I’d never heard of shadowing as a technique for learning a […]
Today I’m going to talk about the hierarchy of competence, which is often visualized as a pyramid with four stages of learning. The goal of the learner is to complete each stage and move to the next without skipping anything in the previous stage. And the ultimate goal, of course, is to climb up to […]
In this post I will discuss one of the biggest mistakes English learners make when they want to sound fluent. This is something that many people do but don’t realize that it makes them sound less clear. When we first start listening to native English speakers, we can’t even understand where one word ends and […]
In this post I will discuss several English rules that you might have learned but native speakers don’t always follow. Keep in mind, though, that I will be talking about speakers in the US, and it might be different in other countries. In this post you will learn what kind of mistakes Americans make when […]
Do you really have to start speaking English as soon as possible and what if you don’t do it? How long do you need to spend in the “silent” stage when you just listen to others? And what if you make lots of mistakes and you feel that other people judge your intelligence based on […]
