How Can You Sound More Like a Native Speaker? Perhaps the first question to address is why you want to sound more like a native speaker. Lots of language learners don't worry much about pronunciation. They think that as long as people can get what they're saying, that's all that matters. And there's some truth in this: you don't need a perfect accent to communicate well with native speakers. But the more you sound like a native speaker, the easier it is for them to understand you. And the easier it is for people to understand you, the more they enjoy talking to you. This comes in handy, given that you need to talk to people to learn their language.Here are some articles to help you with this:But why do we have accents in the first place? And what can we do about them? Why Do We Have Foreign Accents? There are two main reasons language learners have foreign accents. First, it can be difficult to tell the difference between two sounds that don't exist in our native language. Second, other languages can have sounds that make us use our mouth muscles in a new way. Essentially, we need to learn how to train our mouth muscles to form these new sounds. And train our ears to hear the sounds that don’t exist in our native language. Sound Differences That Don't Exist in Our Own Language When I started learning Italian, I spent a few months desperately trying to avoid the word anno (“year”), for fear of accidentally saying the word ano (“ass”). I couldn't hear the difference at all.On the flip side, I'm a native English speaker, so the difference between the “sheep” and “ship” vowels seems obvious. But lots of learners struggle with the difference, which explains why everyone's terrified of speaking English on holiday, with all those .This happens because when we're born, we have super little polyglot brains. They can tell the difference between sounds in any language.As we grow older, our brain focuses on sounds that are important for our native language and filters out sounds that are not. This is good, as it helps us understand our own language better. But it causes problems for language learners because they filter out sounds that might be in the language they're learning.But it’s important to note that this does not mean that there’s such a thing as being ”. It just means that we need to focus our attention on this area of our learning. How to Tell Sounds Apart Linguists have been studying this phenomenon for years. And they've found a way to help learners hear and pronounce the difference between these tricky sounds.This method, known as minimal pair training, involves listening to a word that has the sound difference you want to learn (like ship or sheep), deciding which one you think it is, and getting immediate feedback about whether you were right or wrong.After a few sessions, you'll hear the difference more easily and be able to pronounce them better. You set up your own minimal pair training by using to download sound files of the words you want to learn to tell apart.Then use to put the sound file on the question side and the written word on the other. Listen to the word, try to guess which one it is, then flip the flashcard over to see if you were right. How to Train Your Mouth Muscles for Correct Pronunciation Some sounds are difficult because they involve completely new mouth positions, like the in Spanish or the “U” in French. For these sounds, science has some good news. It turns out that with a little perseverance, it's absolutely possible to train your mouth muscles to pronounce sounds more like native speakers.To do this, you need to learn a little about articulatory phonetics (which is a fancy-pants way of saying mouth positions). This helps us find out exactly where the tongue, teeth and lips should be in the sounds you want to learn. Then practice them until your mouth naturally moves to that position.To learn more about this, try doing a quick search on YouTube. There are tons of pronunciation videos which explain the mouth positions in the language you're learning. A good example is . , Looking for a language learning method that actually works? From setting effective goals to making practice a regular habit, there are many ways to improve your progress., Speaking a foreign language is one of the most rewarding yet challenging tasks you can ever take on. Get these top language learning tips from the experts..