Speak English Clearly & Confidently (& your FREE Email course!)

Video Lesson #19

Do you need a new way to practice your English speaking and pronunciation skills? My private students have had so much success practicing with the Imitation Technique – I just had to share it with you!

‘To imitate' something is the same as ‘to copy' something. So this technique is about copying what a native speaker says – exactly! It teaches you to listen to the sounds and patterns of English – and trains you to make those same sounds yourself. You are training your mouth with your EARS (by listening to the sounds) and not with your EYES (by reading and guessing the sounds). You are training your mouth with your ears.

Video Script:

So.. You want to speak English Clearly & Confidently? I'm Emma, from mmmEnglish and I can help you.

Your pronunciation and clear expression is so so important if you want to speak English clearly and confidently. But it's not only the individual sounds of English that are important so you pronounce words correctly. It's also the word stress, sentence stress, pause and intonation that can affect the meaning and clarity of your English sentences.

Word stress is making one syllable in a word stronger. And it can affect the meaning of a word in English, like this example:
Advice
Advise
Sentence stress is making the important words in sentences stronger. Without this stress, we'd sound like robots!
Do you like banana milkshakes? (shake head)
Do you like banana milkshakes? Adding stress, pause and intonation will make your English clearer and easier to understand.   
So why is all of this important? 
If you find listening to English difficult, these are the magic keys that will unlock your understanding of spoken English. For native speakers, stress, pause and intonation come naturally – they listen, learn and copy the sounds and patterns of English from when they are children. But non-native speakers, who learn English in a completely different way, find it difficult to learn and practice the patterns of of spoken English. If you're a non-native English speaker, you probably have two main problems:
  • Native speakers speak too quickly, so it's difficult for you to understand them.
  • It is difficult for native English speakers to understand you, because you speak English with an unnatural pattern or rhythm.   
But for non-native speakers, it's not easy to learn how to correctly pronounce words, or which words should be stressed in a sentence, or which syllables should be stressed in words.
But I'm going to show you a new way to study and practice this today that will make it so much easier for you to practice. It's called the imitation technique (or sometimes it's called shadowing) and it works so well with my private students – they've had so much success using this technique – that I want to share it with you today. 
How does imitation technique work? 
To imitate something is to copy something – so you are simply going to copy what a native speaker is saying. You just need an audio recording of a native speaker talking at normal speed. It's really simple, all you need to do is listen to the first sentence and repeat it, exactly as you hear it, copying the stress, pause and pronunciation used by the speaker.
 
Why does it work?
Because it teaches you to listen to the sounds and patterns of English. You are not reading the words and guessing how to pronounce them, you are hearing them exactly as they should sound and imitating them – creating those same sounds yourself. It is the same way that children learn to speak from their parents – by imitating or copying someone else. When you practice with the imitation technique, you will reduce your accent and pronunciation problems quickly and become a clearer English speaker. 

When learning to speak English confidently, it's so important to practice and improve your pronunciation AND to become familiar with the patterns of English. 

And I'm going to help you do exactly that, in this free email training course. In every lesson, I have created a training video to help you practice this technique. 

All you need to do is click the link below… And I'll email you five free lessons to practice the imitation technique so that soon you'll sound like a confident, comfortable, natural English speaker.

So what are you waiting for! Sign up for my free imitation lessons so you can speak English clearly and confidently!

 

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mmmEnglish Video Lessons focus on English in daily life. You can watch them on your computer, phone or tablet. They are only short, so you can watch them again and again!