How To Sound English

Hello. To begin with I have to say that I'm not English myself. Actaully that makes me more suitable to talk about this than if I had been English really. I'll explain why later. I'll try to write down some general advices in how you could sound more English. 

I have studied English for eight years and I have always had an ability to sound as if I actually come from the countries whos language I'm studying. I have studied English (obviuosly), French, German and some brief Chinese. I am by no means good at any of those languages (except maybe English) but since I do have the ability to sound authentic I still get top grades in them. For example in French I only just managed thru barely in my opinion. My vocabularly was very limited and in knowledge I deserved maybe an average grade but I still got top grades. In other words I was able to fool the teacher that I was good at french by just sounding as if I were from France. Unfair grades perhaps? But honestly if you got top grades and knew you deserved less, would you argue with your teacher about it? I think not. This is not really a natural talent I believe, I just have some special techniques that enables me to sound as a native speaker.

Enough of the bullshit. In order to sound English you really need to get the correct accent. If you nail the pronunciations it will be good too but that's not what makes you sound as if you were from England. I can pronounce an English word perfectly well with a Swedish accent (I'm from Sweden by the way, nice to meet you), just as you probably could do with your own accent. First things first. Choose an accent. You could for example chose a british, american, canadian or australian accent. I have involuntary chosen the american accent since there are so many american movies and tv-shows on Swedish television. The american accent is also kind of easy to adapt to. I just have to say that I do love the british accent but I'm to lazy to change now.

Once you have chosen the accent try find and listen to a native speaker and then try to imitate that person. If you doesn't have the opportunity to meet up with a native speaker, television is a good alternative. Atleast it is in Sweden since we do not dub any movies or shows. There must be someway you can get the opportunity to listen to an English accent. Use your imagination. Once you now know how it sounds like and you have tried to imitate it I have a little exercise that I find useful. Speak on your own language with the accent you discovered!!! Then you can say the same sentence both with your native accent and your newly discovered English accent in order to compare. If you do that you will eventually learn how your mouth is shaping the words differently depending on which accent you use.

When you have the accent you will automatically be able to pronunciate the most words corretly. In other words you will get a lot of things for free when nailing the accent (not everything though).

So that's it. You now know how to sound English.

No. Sorry it isn't as easy as that. Although I reckon that this is something most people could learn, you really have to practice alot.

The reason I said that I perhaps was more suitable of talking about the subject than a true English person is that a true English person is raised with the accent from the beginning. He/she never needed to adapt in the first place.

If you by some reason completely disagree or think that this is complete rubbish then please ignore it and forget all about it. There's no need for rude comments however if you have some more tips on this subject then please share.

Have a great day!