Please evaluate my speech

[test1386824]

Hi,
I hope I don't come off as selfish by requesting someone to evaluate my recording. I'm pretty good at English, and my speaking skills/accent is mostly comprehensible (or so I hope!). I constantly try to improve my speech by reading out loud, but whenever I listen to my recording I feel that something is not quite right. I have no idea if its my pronunciation, tone, intonation, or something else entirely. I have been living in Australia for the past year and I often get asked to repeat myself especially when speaking to a stranger, which gets quite frustrating. I would greatly appreciate any criticisms of my recording, especially from native English speakers.

Here the link to my recording (first two paragraphs from "To Kill a Mockingbird"):


Thanks!

Excerpt:
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm wassomewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his handwas at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.
When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.

 

[PHenry1026]

Greetings,

The only problem I noticed with your speech is that you speak too quickly. I am sure that if a native English speaker spoke that rapidly some listeners would ask him or her to repeat what they just said. Try slowing down the rate of speed of your speech and you should be just fine.

;-) Percy

 

[Tdol]

Reading out loud is not a great way to develop natural speech- as they're someone else's words, the intonation often becomes artificial. There's a point in your reading when you add the word all, then correct yourself and read it without- it would probably sound more natural if you'd left it in and worried less about being 100% true to the text. Try interviewing yourself and speaking naturally.

To be honest, your speech is reasonable- they are a few mispronunciations ('cared') but there's nothing there that leaps out to me that makes you hard to understand, so you shouldn't be having to repeat yourself a lot.