Pratica di Shadowing: How I Got My American Accent - Impara a parlare inglese con i video
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Please make a video about how you have come to this level of sounding very native.
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I'm sure many of your fans, including me, want to hear your story.
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Thanks in advance.
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Well, thank you so much for your question.
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I did work quite a bit on my American accent, so I'm going to tell you exactly what I did.
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Before I get into that, though, I want to mention a couple of things.
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First and foremost, changing your accent or adjusting your speech to a different language, to a different way of pronouncing things,
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has some sort of psychological effect on us.
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and then you're like, oh, this hurts, this hurts, this hurts.
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It's because you have been doing some movements that you're not used to, that you haven't done before.
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And because this feels like an effort, we are working with some muscles in our jaws here and our tongues and everything.
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It does feel like it is harder to work on an accent or pronunciation.
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So a lot of people choose not to do those things
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and not to work with the muscles because that's what changing an accent is.
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movements with your muscles around your mouth on your face.
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So a lot of people choose to maintain their native language mouth
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and pronounce the English words with the same native language mouth.
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For example, the word cat.
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cat.
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If I said it in my Romanian native mouth, it would sound like cat.
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kat because that's how i read c a and t for some other languages it could be cut
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cut because the mouth doesn't open right so it doesn't go as cat right but it goes cut
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cut because that's what that mouth is used to
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so there's this misconception that
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if someone's trying really hard to sound american they're trying to become american
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and they don't want to lose their identity
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or they don't want to lose their culture or their language
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which brings me to my second point the fear of looking like you're pretending to be someone else
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or that you want to become someone else many people think like
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if i'm not american why should i try to sound like one a problem in itself if that's a choice, like if that's a conscious choice,
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like you make it a point that you don't want to change the way you sound.
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You don't want to have a perfect American or British or Australian accent.
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That's fine.
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But if you want to improve and you want to actually integrate and sound American,
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then you have to let go of this irrational fear that you are pretending to be someone else.
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Honestly, that's a little bit true.
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Like you are about to change your facial way you open your mouth, the melody of your voice,
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the tone, your reactions to certain things, what you say in certain situations.
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However, I can guarantee you, you're a smart person.
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So you're not going to lose your identity or your culture.
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You're just going to improve it.
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You're going to take whatever you love the most from your culture, and you're going to add whatever you love the most from a different culture.
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Therefore, you're just going to become a more open -minded, rounded person that's all.
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You just have to trust yourself a little more on that.
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Okay, so let's start with what I did exactly to get my American accent to where it is today.
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It's going to be a long one, so please grab a coffee or any other non -alcoholic beverage of your choice and sit back and relax.
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Okay, so this is going to be a little bit of a timeline situation.
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So let's start with seven years old, 1997.
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So one day when I was seven, I turned the TV on.
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There was a telenovela, soap opera, TV show situation on TV.
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It was called Sunset Beach.
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And it was about these like, you know, beautiful people running around on the beach, saving people.
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There's lifeguards.
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There's, I don't know, I think it was in somewhere, Santa Monica, somewhere in California.
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I don't know where the action was happening.
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But me being from Republic of Moldova,
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from a tiny village, whoa.
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Anyway, so obviously it was an American show, so I started watching it and started getting infatuated by the way they spoke,
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and I started imitating them.
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I started pretending I'm one of them.
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For some reason, I started to also imitate exactly how they were talking.
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Like, I was rolling my R's.
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I was watching their mouths to see what were they doing so the sound comes out the way it did.
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I would notice the this.
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I would notice the nasal sounds and kind of like the deeper sounds,
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the way they open their mouth really widely compared to how I was talking in Romanian.
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So I was kind of absorbing little words, little bits and pieces.
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The show was translated in Romanian, so I would, or there were Romanian subtitles.
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So I would listen to English and kind of see what
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that meant without knowing what the words actually looked like written in English.
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I only knew them by So then in second grade in 1998, when I was eight years old,
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we had to choose a foreign language to start learning in school.
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So our school offered French and English and we had to choose between.
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these two.
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My parents chose English because they kind of noticed already that I was into English, so might as well.
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Maybe many of you don't know this, but in Republic of Moldova and in many European countries, learning a foreign language is a mandatory subject.
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It's not something that my parents chose to put me in, or it was an extracurricular activity.
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No, it was just part of the curriculum.
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So it was 30 people in our class or 28 or something like that, 30 or 31.
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And somewhere around that number.
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And English was just like math or Romanian or physics or any other subject.
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Well, not physics in second grade, but just like whatever basic subjects we had.
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It was maybe once or twice a week.
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We had it with a teacher who was, I think, Ukrainian that had moved to Moldova.
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She had a good accent, but it wasn't perfect.
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Let's just say that.
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So when we practicing at home.
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So for some reason, I just imagined that I knew things.
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And then we would learn first the basics, you know, the numbers and the fruits and veggies and body parts and all of that.
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But then we would start obviously moving into some word groups or some sentences and just kind of doing our basic,
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you know, textbook English.
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But then I would take that and I would go home
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and I would keep doing my imitation play with my shows
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and then I would connect the knowledge that I had gotten from school with what I was saying.
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So then I started recognizing these patterns
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like "oh okay plurals" "oh okay he /she gets s" at the end of the verb.
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So little things like that that started to make sense in my head.
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However there was nobody for me to practice with.
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Nobody spoke English.
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I had no friends who spoke English.
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The only person that would speak English decently was our teacher and we barely spoke in class.
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You know how it is.
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But I was slowly starting to get obsessed with English, with American English.
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So when I would come to school and we had to read, I don't know, a sentence or something, I would roll my R's and I would open my mouth.
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And kids started making fun of me because they were like, oh, look at her, the American.
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But jokes on them because a year later,
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and whatever else they needed to copy my answers at tests.
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So they wanted the American to help them.
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And here's an interesting fact here.
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Whenever someone came to me asking for help with their homework, for example, what tense should I use here?
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Present, perfect or past simple i could have just given them the answer like use this
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but no i was like okay well let's look at it
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what do you think you should use here they were like bro just give me the answer
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and i was like no no like let's see why are we using present perfect here
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and then i would ask them questions and then they would actually start thinking
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and then i would make them get to the right answer and then i was like
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hold on do i like teaching so going back to my attitude towards learning english
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and my accent so a few years down the road i was learning english in school i wasn't speaking much because
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it's just a normal old school traditional teaching method so then i discovered these little
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tricks and little tools to make my pronunciation better and my accent a lot smoother.
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Things like tongue twisters.
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And I thought they were pretty funny because the more you said those things, the more melody you learned.
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So then I realized like, oh, English accent and pronunciation is not only about the words
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and how to pronounce each word like in an isolated way right it's about how you connect them
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so then I learned about okay connected speech because
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when I was listening to the actors talking in these shows
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they wouldn't stop after each word right like we would read a text in English class
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and kids would actually break after robotic.
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So then I was like, no, no, no, that's not how they talk though.
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Then tongue twisters, repetition, and connected speech kind of started to slowly become a part of my learning,
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even though they weren't necessarily part of the curriculum.
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Like nobody was talking about these things at school.
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So I took these things and I continued my mirror talk, right?
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Like I was imagining that thing that I would say to anybody in my life would be in English.
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Like if I was mad at my mom, I would answer to her in my head.
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Like I would talk back to her in my head, but in English.
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If I had like some beef with someone at school, I would imagine that I would like tell them off in English.
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If I, I don't know, I wanted to share my opinions about something,
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I was doing that in was around or talking in front of the mirror or like mouthing,
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like pretending I was talking.
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And then I would go back to school, get a little bit more knowledge, but it got to a point where I was kind of going a little bit ahead of the curriculum
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and of the textbook.
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And I thought, you know, whatever we were studying wasn't enough.
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So then I was really, really happy when we had a couple of English teachers coming.
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Well, they weren't real English teachers, just Peace Corps the U .S to our village,
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they were Americans to teach us English and they were like 23,
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24 year old people, very young people who would just have a couple classes with us throughout the week
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and then they would do some little activities like hip -hop dancing
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or basketball and then obviously you would have to talk to them in English.
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So we had like a little bit of exposure to a real I was like,
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oh my God, this person talks just like the people in the movies.
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So it's not just, it's not fake.
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It's real.
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This is how they talk.
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And then I would listen to my teacher and I was like, I don't think that's the best thing source for me to learn.
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So I was kind of a terrible student
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because I would correct my teacher or I would kind of like make little jokes.
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I feel bad about it.
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I shouldn't have done it, but I was a kid and I just, you know, I thought that I'm the shit.
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But up until that point, I think the biggest realization, the biggest thing that I learned was that In school, we only focused on grammar,
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on some vocabulary words that we didn't really need and a lot of written information, a lot of written work.
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There was no talk about melody.
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There's no talk about tone.
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There's no talk about connected speech.
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There is no speaking activities.
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There was no practice activities.
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It was just reading and writing.
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Anyway, so I was a good student.
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I was getting good grades.
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I was going to all these like national contests or whatever.
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Maybe not national, like district maybe.
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So I kind this illusion in my head that I was really good at English, right?
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And I kind of was in a school, from a school perspective.
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So I graduated high school, I went to university, and guess what?
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No, I did not apply to an English major or something related to English or languages.
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No, I applied for economic studies.
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I applied to be an accountant.
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Clearly, you can see that was not my calling, true vocation in life.
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However, in that first year, I discovered this work and travel program,
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which allows you to go to the United States for a summer and work there.
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And usually the jobs are in hospitality, either restaurants, hotels, amusement parks, and stuff like that.
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So I begged my parents to help me out and to come up with the money because it was quite expensive.
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And I went before going that set me up with the job was like, your English is so good.
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You're going to do amazing.
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Like there is not a lot of people with such good English coming out of high school.
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And I was like, oh yeah.
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Oh yeah.
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America, here I come.
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And then my job was a line cook in a seafood restaurant in Alaska, in a very small fishing village.
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And needless to say, I was...
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I had like a rude awakening of how badly I knew English, actually. And...
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not speaking it because I would speak it decently.
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People would understand what I would say, right?
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But it was the listening part that was terrible and the actual change of a setting, right?
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I was in a fast -paced environment.
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That was my first job ever.
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I was in a foreign country.
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I didn't think to learn kitchen vocabulary.
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I didn't think to learn what's a lid.
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There was like a lot of different tools and equipment in that kitchen that when they would ask me to bring something, I would freeze.
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Like, and I was so ashamed to ask what it is because I knew it was something simple.
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I literally cried for the first two weeks.
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It was so hard.
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It was so nerve -wracking.
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On my feet for, I don't know, nine, ten hours, my shoes would get wet from all, like, the water and, like, there was oil everywhere.
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It was just not a great environment.
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But then I made the decision that I have to come back, not to Alaska, but go back to the U .S for another summer,
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somewhere else, somewhere warmer where I would make a little bit more money.
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I would travel.
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So that's what I did.
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I went home, graduated from accounting, and then I decided to apply for a master's degree
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just to be able to go to the United States again because I had to be a student.
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However, I picked a major that made sense.
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interpretation in English.
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And it was a lot better because all the activities
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and all the curriculum and everything would be kind of focused around translation and not only written translation, but conference interpretation.
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It's like simultaneous translation.
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Like you hear me talk and I have to translate at the same time.
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And that's really hard.
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And we would do actual practical activities.
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And I love that.
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That challenged me a lot.
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So while I was in my offered an English teaching job.
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like a part -time English teaching job.
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Actually, I wasn't offered it.
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I applied for it.
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I wanted to to get a job to make some extra money.
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So I applied, I got hired, and I left for the states for a summer.
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I worked as a bartender at this time so my accent improved
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so much more because as a bartender you have to talk to people.
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You have to talk to your colleagues, you have to talk to your customers continuously.
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Like it never stops.
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Now the fact that I was surrounded by native speakers was great.
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But I couldn't really understand a lot of the things they were saying to me.
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I couldn't understand their jokes.
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I couldn't really understand their references.
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I couldn't understand, you know, their like.. comments and little notes on things.
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I would just kind of like pretend I was laughing.
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I'm sure most of the times I wouldn't, you know, my reaction wouldn't match with what they would say.
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And yeah, it was kind of awkward, but listen, I'm not from here, okay?
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You gotta adjust your speech to me.
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So it was quite difficult to do a job because not only I had to learn how to make
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that there was no time for me to go and check a book.
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I had to like remember all the recipes, take the orders, punch them in, do all the payments, make the drinks,
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you know, talk to whoever else was around me because we had like bartender assistants, talk to the guests in front of me who were watching.
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Not only that, but I was also focusing on,
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you know, catching what they sits at the bar and they want to be entertained.
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They want to talk to you.
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They want to have a good time.
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They don't understand that you're like, struggling and you're trying to do like a million things at once they just feel like
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you know you're a pro and you can handle it
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and you're there for them and you are in a way
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but you're also doing a million other things
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so in a way i wasn't at
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that time consciously trying to work on my accent
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but i had to because i would listen to what people would say
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and then i would kind of mimic what they would say right i would just continue
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that imitation game you have to remember at that time
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when i was learning english i didn't have a phone i didn't have internet like 12, 13, 14, 15, and a lot of people think like,
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"Oh my God, it took you so long to get to this level.
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I you know don't have
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that time i don't want to invest this much time you
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don't have to invest this much time anymore you have you have this
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that is so valuable that has
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so much in it you have apps for everything you have
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ai for everything you can find people to talk to real
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people native speakers to talk to at any time of the day
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or night right i didn't have any of that so you can cut my timeline,
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how long it took me to learn English into probably like five.
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So you only need a couple years.
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So you're good.
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So I left the U .S.
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I went back to Moldova.
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I continued teaching English.
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I opened my own school and then four or five years later we decided to go to Canada.
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So in 2018 we finish.
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was good at this point, right?
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Because I had studied it, I had practiced it, I had taught it, right?
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But when I arrived to Canada, a lot of people, like I would say one sentence, and they'd be like, "Oh, where are you from?" And I was like, hold on.
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I thought I had a really good accent.
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I went to the US twice.
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People were like surprised by my English.
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Oh, I thought you were from here.
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That's what they were telling me.
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But in Canada, people are like, Oh, where are you from?
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And then it was so funny.
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Later, I was watching some of my stories from 2018 on Instagram.
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And when I was speaking English, and I was like, she has an accent i can hear it now
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so in canada yes i was aware that i had an accent but i didn't really know exactly what
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it was like what the issue was
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so i wasn't really consciously working on it i was just
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kind of like going with the flow i got hired um
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at a restaurant i started serving then i started uh
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or then i got promoted into restaurant management
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so then i had to learn kind of like a different side of english
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which is more professional more polished kind of business english not super corporate but i was
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representative of a company so I had to observe and learn how people were communicating.
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So I had to upgrade my vocabulary a little bit, my expressions, the way I communicated some things, both pleasant and unpleasant.
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I learned how to choose my words carefully.
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I learned how to provide feedback.
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Anyway, that's a whole nother video.
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The point is I elevated my English because of this job.
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And if you're an English learner, you know this, you're always kind of paying attention.
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attention to what people say, how people say it, what exactly, you know, what is the expression they used, what is the word they used.
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You're always kind of aware of how people talk.
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So then in 2024, we left Canada.
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Now I'm traveling.
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I'm speaking English to people from different countries not english -speaking countries right and it's not really about how perfect
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other people's English is.
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It's about how you connect to people.
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And accent is important, yes, because you want to be clear.
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You want people to understand you.
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Because let me tell you, I've had some difficult situations.
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Accents are not the most important thing in learning a language, as long as you are clear enough so people can understand what you're saying,
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so you can connect to them, you can And even though I teach English and I have all this experience,
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I still have an accent and I'm trying to improve it by practicing English a lot.
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Like these videos that I do, you know, going live on TikTok, doing all these lessons with my students.
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This is me practicing too.
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It never stops.
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Learning never stops.
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Right.
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So if a native speaker would hear me, they would say I have an accent.
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English and they're at the beginning they would think I'm a native speaker, right?
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It's all about perception.
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The important thing is
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as long as you keep practicing you're going to be improving
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you know i still do tongue twisters every day i still try to whenever i watch tv
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and i and i see a word
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that i didn't really know how to read before how to
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say before then i practice it like for example um hierarchy hierarchy i used to say it's hierarchy
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or something you know and then i hear it And then I'm like, oh, hierarchy.
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Learning never stops.
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Anyway, thank you so much for watching.
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I'm going to be posting a lot more kind of like story vibe videos
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and just kind of explaining a little bit more about who I am, why I'm here.
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Obviously, I've had my TikTok for a long, well, not a long time, but probably a year now.
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So if you came from there or if you follow me there,
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a lot more time to ramble and yap.
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On top of that, I'm planning to post a lot more complete English lessons here.
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So yeah, if you want to keep up with that, Make sure you follow.
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Not follow.
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Subscribe.
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You subscribe here.
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Okay, love you.
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Bye!
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Cosa imparerai da questo video
Questo video ti insegna a superare le barriere psicologiche legate al cambiamento di accento e a lavorare sulle muscoli della bocca per una pronuncia più naturale. Imparerai anche a integrare l'accento americano senza perdere la tua identità, diventando una persona più aperta e versatile. Oltre a questo, scoprirai strategie concrete per migliorare la pronuncia inglese, come l'osservazione attenta dei movimenti facciali e l'imitatio diretta.
Ascolta questi suoni e tecniche
Nell'audio, il speaker parla di "connected speech" (parola collegata) e riduzioni, come nel caso della parola "cat": se pronunciata con la "bocca nativa" rumena, diventa "kat", mentre in inglese americano è "cat" con un'apertura della bocca più ampia. Nota anche come la melodia e il tono cambino a seconda dell'accento, e come le reazioni verbali siano legate alla cultura. Questi dettagli sono fondamentali per capire come funzionano le connessioni tra le parole e le riduzioni nel linguaggio parlato.
Parla come un madrelingua: ritmo e stress
Per imitare il ritmo e lo stress dell'accento americano, usa la tecnica del "shadowing in inglese": ascolta una frase, pausa e ripetila immediatamente, cercando di copiare non solo i suoni ma anche i movimenti della bocca e la melodia. Il "shadow speech" ti aiuta a familiarizzare con i muscoli non usati normalmente, come quelli della mascella e della lingua. Ricorda che lo stress sulle parole giuste (ad esempio, nel nome "American" si stressa la seconda sillaba) e il ritmo fluido sono chiave per sembrare naturale. Non temere di "fingere": stai semplicemente aggiungendo una nuova competenza linguistica, senza perdere la tua personalità. Con la pratica costante, il "shadow speak" diventerà un'abitudine, e la tua pronuncia inglese migliorerà notevolmente.
La grammatica di questo video
Le strutture che chi parla usa di più, con le parole esatte del video:
| Struttura | Nel video |
|---|---|
| Frasi condizionali if + frase, will/would + verbo — una condizione e il suo risultato | if a native speaker would hear |
| Forma passiva be + participio passato — conta ciò che accade, non chi lo fa | could be cut · was called · was translated |
| Present perfect have/has + participio passato — un’azione passata che conta ancora adesso | have come · haven't done · I've had |
| Frasi relative who / which + frase — un’informazione in più su una persona o una cosa | teacher who was · friends who spoke · people who would |
Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?
Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.