[General] How To Speak English Like Its Native Speakers?

[alizehjafri]

I have no idea if this is the right forum to ask this question, but I am desperate and need help here. Please help me, if you can.

To expand on the question, there are two issues that I have identified:

1) There are certain words I have difficulty in pronouncing, such as the words ending on sts(e.g. requests) or the words with rl(e.g. world, girl) - how do I improve on that? Pronouncing these words becomes even more difficult when I am using them long sentences and I end up mumbling them out.

2) My written English is very good, but it doesn't work when it comes to speaking. I can write down perfect sentence structures, but, when it comes to speaking, I take a lot of time to process my thoughts and, even then, I am unable to come up with perfect sentence structures and words come out of my mouth all jumbled up.

Few more details:

I have been through few free online courses/some videos and suggestions are always vague and generic - the usual, you need to talk more in English, you need to learn phrases instead of words, you need to be more confident etc - I do understand all of that, but I am holding out for something more concrete, I am hoping someone here has gone through similar experience and can point me towards a course or tell me specific steps he took to improve his spoken English?

I want to be able to speak and respond in English like I can in my native language(Urdu), automatically, without much thinking involved. Please help me with it. Thank you.

 

[new_yorker]

I can see that your English writing is very well! The sentence structures are clear and concise, so bravo to you!

I know some people who know English as their second language and when they try to pick up the pronunciations in the proper accent, it just doesn't come. This is mainly because one's tongue gets used to a certain language and the accent used to speak that language that when it comes to speaking in another language the accents don't work out completely.

My best advice for you is to have a firm understanding of the phonetics of certain words. There's long vowels and short vowels, and English can be a complicated language, in terms of pronunciation of certain words, because there are different rules that you have to get used to in order to say certain words with their proper pronunciations.

Native speakers (such as me) have spoken English and have been surrounded constantly by people who are native speakers too for a very, very, very long time. My family and I emigrated from a foreign country when I was four years-old so I was able to pick up the accent of the native speakers quite quickly. However, much of my family still carry their native and foreign accents with them whenever they speak.

Certainly continue to listen to people as much as you can and start working out how they pronounce some words. Look on YouTube and there are videos that you can use where the speaker pronounces the words syllable-by-syllable to help you out.

And finally you have this website to help you around too!

 

[Tdol]

words with rl(e.g. world, girl)

How do you try to pronounce these? I am a British English speaker from England, which is non-rhotic - which means we do not pronounce the /r/. If I don't pronounce it, there's plenty of room for you to skip it too.