When accent IS a bottleneck
Eva BrukIf you don't buy the whole 'your accent is fine the way it is' pep talk... OR can't understand some tricky native pronunciation...
I want to share a incredibly effective exercise that I always recommend, yet few people actually try. It can be surprisingly fun, takes just 5–10 minutes, and offers multiple benefits. Do it regularly and you will:
⭐️ boost your fluency;
⭐️ help your brain adopt correct grammar patterns and speak more accurately;
⭐️ activate your vocabulary;
⭐️ learn to speak faster;
⭐️ improve your listening comprehension;
⭐️ pick up native-like intonation;
⭐️ ... and work on your pronunciation :)
Yep, I'm talking about shadowing. It's pretty simple:
1️⃣ Pick a video — preferably with a speaker that you like and on a topic related to your profession / interests.
2️⃣ Listen to 1-4 min, try to understand as much as you can. If it's very challenging, you can turn the subtitles on.
Important to note: you don't have to understand everything or even most of it — that's not the point. I did this exercise with a Spanish podcast where I could understand maybe 40% of what was said, but the exercise still did the trick. In a couple of weeks my brain started generating random collocations in a barely known language, and my pronunciation is pretty decent.
3️⃣ Play the chosen fragment again and speak together with the speaker. Like a kid, try to mimic everything you hear — doesn't matter if the words make sense to you or not. DON'T READ THE SUBTITLES. As soon as you start reading, you'll stop listening. The brain works on the cross-inhibition principle.
You will stumble a lot. That's ok. Just pick up wherever the speaker is at the moment. If you're new to this exercise - managing to repeat even a few words in a row is a good result!
If your speech is already advanced, you can try some more challenging topics, pick an accent you like, focus on your intonation and body language more — treat it as an acting exercise.
Here is an Instagram account of a lady who does it really great.
The hardest part of this activity is doing it regularly. One thing you can try is whenever you watch a reel in English — just watch it again and do shadowing. That way you can minimize extra effort.
PS, I made a simple bot on Telegram for daily English practice, shadowing being one of the exercises you can do. There are some links there, if you don't know which video to pick. You can pin it in your saved messages for quick access and give it a try🙂
Read more:
Language Barrier: what it's protecting us from
What's my English level and what does it mean?
Is the IT vocabulary bubble enough?
Boost your work vocabulary in a week
Want to practice English in 1-1 meetings / in a community? Visit my page💜