Our first essential tip is DON’T BE AFRAID TO MOVE YOUR MOUTH! When speaking your first language, your face feels comfortable because you’ve been moving your jaw and mouth and cheeks that way since the days when you first learned to speak.

However, when learning English, there are probably some jaw movements or mouth positions which really feel unnatural. As long as these continue to feel unnatural, you will have difficulty when trying to make the correct English sounds. You must practice moving your mouth the way Native English speakers do. 

Watch clips of people talking and repeat their words exactly or repeat their words silently, so that you are simply copying their mouth rather than making any actual sound. 

Tongue twisters are a great way to familiarize yourself with some difficult sounds in English. They help drill certain mouth positions, along with giving you the chance to hear one single sound repeated many times so you become accustomed to hearing it. 

The thief thought the thistle thanked them through their theatre. (Hint there are TWO different TH sounds to practice in this tongue twister).

Babies often listen to the world around them for every waking hour of their day….this might be one reason why they pick up sounds and language so quickly! If you have free time, you should be listening to English, it's that simple. Even if it's just on in the background, the sounds of English must be flowing into your ears for as many hours per day as you can manage. 

Don’t worry, you won’t forget your first language by doing this, you’ll just become MUCH better at hearing, understanding and producing the sounds of English. This is often the difference between a non-native speaker who SOUNDS LIKE a native speaker, and non-native speakers who worry that their pronunciation or accent will be difficult for native speakers to understand. 

Listen to podcasts. Watch youtube videos. Watch the daily news in English. Listen to audiobooks while working. Find some English music you like. Do all of the above and you’ll be amazed how quickly your brain adapts to the sounds of English!

Many learners of English think that the key to sounding like a native speaker is to try to speak as fast as they can at all times. This is simply not a good way to improve! 

Instead, you should begin by doing the opposite, and trying to speak MORE SLOWLY and MORE CLEARLY. You should focus on producing the correct sounds and the correct intonation first and then after you’ve said certain phrases and sentences many hundreds of times, you will find that you naturally begin to speed up certain words and sounds, just like native speakers do! 

Don’t rush this learning phase, just keep repeating sentences over and over again by copying native speakers and eventually those sentences will feel so natural that you are able to produce them without much effort, and that’s when you can start speeding things up!

Learning individual words is one thing but learning to tell whole stories and read entire paragraphs the same way native speakers do, is a difficult task! One way to do this is to spend some time focusing NOT on the individual words that native speakers say, but instead, focusing on the stress (some words are louder or quieter than others) they put on certain words, and the intonation (rise or fall of the voice) in their voice during parts of a sentence. Practice this as often as possible and you will find native speakers cannot even tell that you are not one of them! One good way to do this is to listen to people reading poems in English.