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 […]
Shadowing session with Leila Hormozi
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 […]
Shadowing session with Maria Menounos
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 […]
Speaking fast doesn’t make you sound fluent
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 […]
Commonly confused pairs of words in English
As you might already know, there are some words in English that sound very similar or even identical but have different meanings. Even native speakers sometimes make mistakes when they spell some of these words. But for nonnative speakers, these words can be a nightmare. Ok, I might be exaggerating a little, but they are […]
Are you mispronouncing these English words?
Today I would like to discuss some confusion between five pairs of words when it comes to their pronunciation. Pronouncing words correctly in English will not only make you sound more clear and eliminate confusion, but it will also make you more confident. The confusion between the words I’m gonna discuss today comes from the […]
Pronunciation of regular verbs in past tense
Confusing English pronunciation: R vs. L
A couple of years ago, I worked closely with one of the pronunciation coaches in a local college. My job was to listen to students and correct the sounds they were confusing. Each week we practiced a different sound so I noticed how people had their own challenges depending on their native language. One day, […]
What to do when others comment on your accent
Confusing English pronunciation: voiceless stops
The other day I was watching an Instagram live of a well-known guy in the marketing field. He was sharing his business strategy and talking about how he pitched to clients. The only thing is, instead of “pitching” he was saying “bitching.” Now, pitching to clients and bitching to clients are two very different things […]