Shadowing Practice: Why Perfect Pronunciation Is a Waste of Time - Learn English Speaking with Video
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I want to show you a quick video.
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So if you're interested, if you're preparing for TOEFL right now, please continue watching.
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This is me in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2016, sharing my TOEFL experience because I wanted to connect with like-minded people.
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Fast forward to 2026, I've been living in California for over 10 years, I've grown a company here and I give talks, all of that in English.
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Some people, especially in the comments, still tell me they hear my Russian accent,
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But today, I really want to make a video I wish somebody had made for me back in 2014.
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Everything I've learned about sounding like a native while living in California.
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What actually worked for me and what was a complete waste of my time.
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Let's get into it.
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But before we start, I need you to hear this before anything else in this video.
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You do not have or need to sound like an American or a British person or an Australian person.
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you do not need to sound like me.
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You need to sound like you.
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In my case, I chose to work on my American accent because I moved to California.
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I was raising money for my company and I thought that sounding more native would help me build more trust with people.
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Also, my kids are growing up here and this is where I'll probably spend not the rest of my life, but a lot of years.
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So this is my reason and you have your own reason.
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Some people want to keep their accent exactly as it is because it's part of their personality, so all of it is completely fine.
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But here's an important distinction I want you to understand.
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When people say sounding native, they're actually talking about two different things at the same time.
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One is, do you sound like you were born here, let's say in California?
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I have worked on that for 10 years and I still haven't got it.
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It's a lifelong process and honestly, I probably never will.
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I moved here when I was 25 with my entire life already lived in another language.
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The other one is how much work does it take for someone to understand me?
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And this is the part where I got, hopefully, pretty good at.
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This is the most important part because we learn a foreign language to communicate, to be understood, and to be able to get a point across.
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So in this video, I'm going to sort everything I've ever talked about here on this channel into three groups.
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Things that actually matter, things that are nice to have, and things you can completely ignore.
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By the end, you'll know where to spend your practice time.
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That's the whole point.
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It is weird that I can understand everything you said without subtitles, but it's difficult for me to understand some movies without subtitles.
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Haha.
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This comment has 427 likes and 17 replies, and I think about it a lot.
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I got a lot of comments like this, and for a while I thought people were just being nice to me.
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And that could be the reason, but there are also four real reasons, and once you know them, the whole thing stops being mysterious.
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One, I am not a native speaker, and this is a big one.
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English is my second language, so I still sometimes pronounce sounds that Americans have spent their entire lives short-cutting.
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And when Americans short-cut things, you just don't understand what they say sometimes.
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So when I say, I'm going to talk to you about this, you hear every word.
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When my American friends say it, I'm going to talk to you about this.
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2. I'm here alone with you and my mic, and there is no loud music, no dishes in the background, nobody's talking over me.
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In a movie, there are three people at a dinner table, music playing, and somebody laughing in the middle of an important sentence.
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That's why it's easier for you to understand me. And 3.
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I'm explaining something.
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Explaining is naturally clearer than chatting.
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I'm choosing words on purpose.
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I'm pausing between ideas.
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That's rare when it happens at a real dinner party.
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And four, movies are regional and full of slang.
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A show set in Boston, a show set in Atlanta, a show set in London, all have different accents, slang words,
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and shortcuts, and you would need to know them all to understand.
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And this is where it gets real, because it's not just about understanding movies.
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When I first came here and ordered a hot coffee, it was really cold, I think it was March, and I said hot coffee the way I learned it in British English,
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and I got handed a cold coffee because in American English it's hot
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and what I said sounded like hot which reminded them of cold not hat
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so drinking this cold coffee on a cold day was motivation for me to start learning American pronunciation
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so the rest of the video is
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which of these things cost you a cold coffee on a cold day
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and which ones just make you sound different quick pause
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if you understand everything I'm saying right now but you still freeze up
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when you have to speak or you struggle with fast real-world English.
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That is the exact intermediate plateau so many learners get stuck on.
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That is why we created our course from intermediate to advanced.
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It's a seven-week program with 35 short practical lessons covering grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and how to actually start thinking in English.
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Plus, starting from the standard package, you get a live speaking session with a native speaker every single week.
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So you get real-time practice instead of just passive watching.
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More than 20,000 students have already gone through this program one of our students,
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Tom, said it was the only school in his life where he attended every single lesson with pleasure
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and his dream finally came true.
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He actually started speaking English.
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Because you're watching this video, we're giving you free access to one full lesson so you can meet our teacher, Venya Pak, and see how he breaks down every tricky topic.
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I'm pretty sure once you meet Venya, you won't want to stop after just one class.
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Use the promo code LINGUA MARINA for $20 dollars off any plan.
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The link is right below in the description.
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And now let's get into our tier one, the things that actually matter.
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Word stress and sentence stress.
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A 2005 study by a researcher named Field showed just how important word stress is for understanding spoken English.
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He took recordings of words, shifted the stress to the wrong syllable, and asked listeners to write down what they heard.
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When the stress was misplaced, comprehension dropped by as much as 20%.
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This turned out to be a bigger effect than mispronouncing most individual sounds.
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Think about it.
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20% put the stress on the wrong syllable and as many as one in five listeners might not understand the word.
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And it gets more specific.
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Moving the stress to the right later in the word hurts more than moving it to the left.
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So photograph, photographer, photographic.
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Three words, same root, stress moves every time and if you put it in the wrong spot, people genuinely don't know which word you said.
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Let's practice together, say them with me.
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Let me give you another example.
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Record is the noun.
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Record is the verb.
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I want to record a record.
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Another one, present, meaning a gift.
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To present means to show.
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I'll present the present.
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And it's not just inside words, it's across the whole sentence.
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Listen to these two.
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Yeah, the movie was really scary.
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Yeah, the movie was really scary.
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First, yes, it was scary.
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Second one, it wasn't scary at all.
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I'm just making fun of it.
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Same words, the stress did all the work.
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Same thing with can and can't.
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This is actually my favorite.
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Americans don't really pronounce that T in can't.
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I can help you.
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I can't help you.
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The only way for you to know which one was said is by understanding which word I hit harder.
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If I stress the verb, then I can.
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If I stress that can't, I can't.
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I can hear you.
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I can't hear you.
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See the difference?
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This is such an important thing.
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So the task for you is to record yourself saying these sentences out loud
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and to pay attention not to the individual sounds that you're saying, but to where you stress the words and the words in sentences.
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Let's talk about the vowels.
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Number two.
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There are pairs of words, I'm sure you all know them, where switching one vowel, one sound gives you a different word with a completely different meaning.
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Bed and bad, pen and pan, beg and bag, sheep or ship.
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And you watch my mouth because the difference is how far I open it.
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Bed, bad, pen, pan, guess, gas, letter, ladder, beg, bag.
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I'm exaggerating this, but you get the difference, right?
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In a lot of languages, and definitely in Russian, my first language, we just don't open our mouths.
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much.
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In Russian, if you open your mouth too much, people might think weird things of you.
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When I first started speaking English out loud, some of my facial muscles started to hurt.
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When your muscles hurt, that means you're changing behavior of your muscles that are used to your native language.
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So when speaking different languages, we use different muscles to make different sounds.
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And what's funny is I also speak German
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and my muscles don't hurt like that when I speak German
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so because the different language my brain starts hurting because it has so much grammar.
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Okay let's exaggerate.
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This is how you build this muscle memory.
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Bed, bad, beg, bag, pen, pan, guess, guess.
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Okay number And 3.
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Not all sounds are equal.
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And I want to show you the research on this because it genuinely surprised me.
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Linguists measure something called functional load, basically how much a sound difference matters for understanding English.
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And here's what researchers found.
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Three low-priority pronunciation errors were easier to understand than just one high-priority error.
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In other words, not all pronunciation mistakes matter equally.
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It literally matters which ones you spend your energy practicing.
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So, there are some high priority errors, they have high functional load.
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These sound differences separate hundreds of common English words.
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If you mix these up, the listener's brain gets completely lost because you are saying an entirely different thing.
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For example, L versus R.
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Light versus right, lead versus read.
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But here's the difference.
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This is the single highest traded constant contrast in English.
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R and L.
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So for L, you press the tip of your tongue firmly against the roof of your mouth behind the front teeth.
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For R, and for me, that was something that I had to learn because in Russian R sounds like R.
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But for English R, you curl the sides of your tongue up along the upper back teeth.
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The tip must float in the middle of your mouth without touching the roof.
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Because if you touch, you become Russian.
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Like me.
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I'm kidding.
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P versus B.
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Pi versus bi.
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Pack versus back.
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Pride versus bride.
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The difference?
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Both sounds use both lips, but P is unvoiced with a quick burst of air, aspiration.
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While B is voiced, your vocal cords vibrate right as your lips release.
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Put your hand on your throat.
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When you say B, you feel a vibration.
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For P, you should feel no throat vibration, just a pull of air on your hand.
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Now that we talk about some sounds, let's talk about the connected speech.
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This is what you need to know to understand native speakers.
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Whether you use it yourself is completely optional.
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If you want to dig deeper into this, I have nine videos talking about this, but in this video, I want to mention just a couple of the most important things that are super common.
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Reductions.
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When you start learning English at school, you learn, I should have done this.
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You don't start learning, shoulda, coulda, woulda, I should have done this, I could have done this,
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I would have done this and of isn't of it's just a lot of stuff a cup of tea
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another thing that's important to mention
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when him her he have are unstressed the H just disappears I'll tell her about
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that I'll tell her about
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that I saw him yesterday I saw him yesterday was he there was he there
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and by the way yes Sometimes Americans say sounds that are completely different from what's written.
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They don't pronounce every sound separately.
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Sometimes one sound changes because your mouth is already preparing for the next one.
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Good boy.
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Good boy.
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The D turns into B because the next sound is a B and your mouth is already getting ready for it.
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Handbag.
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Handbag.
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Green park.
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Green park.
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I can buy this?
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I can buy this.
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These are not official rules by the way.
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There is no rule in any textbook that would tell you to replace N with M.
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This is just what I notice when I walk around California and listen to people and try to decode them.
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The letter T, my favorite letter in English and I have a whole video dedicated just to it.
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There are so many ways to pronounce this letter.
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Okay that was, I think that was the first American sounding word that I learned.
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I used to say water because I wanted to sound British
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and then I came to the US and my friend Vanya told me water.
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Letter, letter.
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Beautiful, beautiful.
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Button, button.
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Mountain, mountain.
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If you try to say worst job, it turns into a worst job.
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Just one, Americans would say just one.
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The tea just leaves.
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And let's finish up with some classics.
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Going to, gonna, want to, wanna, got to, gotta.
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When it comes to what are you, I would say, what are you doing?
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What are you thinking about?
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And some people would say, what you doing?
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What you talking about?
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It doesn't mean you have to copy them, but it's so much easier to understand people when you know what they might do with a phrase.
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And the thing is, what really helps you understand a language
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and speak like a native is knowing all these different patterns and what people might do with a sentence or a word.
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And then you use whichever parts you feel like using because in Silicon Valley, people have a different style of saying things.
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And because I live here, I naturally try to copy them.
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There's another thing that I wanted to mention.
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Everybody's obsessed with the TH sound, th and th.
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And in that functional load research that I talked about, they actually rank it as a low priority error.
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If you say as this and that instead of this and that, most people will most likely understand you.
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And millions of native speakers don't use it either.
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So if you want to work on it, absolutely please.
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But if you have limited time and you just want people to understand you, this is not what people are going to struggle with.
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Basically, it is not why anyone is asking you to repeat yourself.
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Then the perfect American R.
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It's totally okay if you don't have this one mastered yet.
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Half the English speaking world doesn't pronounce R at the end of the words at all.
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Britain, Australia, a lot of the US.
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Another one is the glottal stop.
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Sometimes people say button instead of button, which kind of sounds cool.
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I think I heard a lot of it in Great Britain.
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It's better to know this to understand others.
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And yes, that makes it sound more local in some regions where people use it, but it does nothing for whether people understand you or not.
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Sounding like you're from a specific place.
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Look at my comment section.
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India, Brazil, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Cuba.
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people who just moved to the US.
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All of these people are talking to each other in English every day
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and understanding each other perfectly and not one of them sounds like they're from California.
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Move all of that time into stress and meaning-changing sounds.
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I want to finish this video with one more piece of research because we love research.
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There is a well-known study from 2010 in which they played people trivia statements.
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Some statements were read by native speakers, some by non-native speakers.
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The exact same statements.
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People rated the ones with an accent as less true, which sounds awful.
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But then they dug into why, and it wasn't prejudice.
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It was effort.
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When a sentence takes more work to process, your brain reads that difficulty as less believable.
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It is a bug in how listening works.
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And then in 2021, a follow-up study was conducted.
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They took people, exposed them to more accented speech, and measured them again.
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Their trust went up just from listening to more of this type of speech.
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The discomfort is real, but it's on their side of conversation and it goes away, the more they hear you.
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Which means the answer is what?
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To keep talking, not to hide until your English is perfect, because that day is not coming for me either.
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I've been working on this for over 10 years, and I know people who've been working on this even more.
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But because we spend most of our lives in a different country, speaking a completely different language.
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It's just hard for us to sound exactly like Americans.
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And I'll be probably working it for another 10 years.
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I still say things and think, oh God, can we re-record that?
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Especially when I create podcasts with the most amazing minds.
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And of course my English flops right there and I start forgetting words and I'm like, why am I the dumbest person in the room?
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But with that exact English, I've built a company, I've built a podcast, I've raised money for both my company and my podcast.
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And I live a life here in a language I started learning
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when I was back in a country when nobody around me spoke it.
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Your accent is not the thing standing between you and what you want.
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If this was useful, hit like and subscribe if you haven't already.
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More than a half of people watching my videos are not subscribed and it genuinely matters for my team and me.
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Will we reach 10 million followers someday on this channel?
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Maybe yes if you help us.
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See you in the next video and bye bye.
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About This Lesson
Ready to focus your English speaking practice on what really matters? In this lesson, we’ll break down key takeaways from a video that challenges the myth of "perfect pronunciation." You’ll learn to prioritize clarity over sounding native, so you can communicate effectively without wasting time on unnecessary skills. Whether you’re using a shadowing site or practicing with videos, this lesson will help you spend your time wisely—because the goal is to be understood, not to mimic a native accent.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Short-cutting (v.): Speaking quickly by reducing or combining sounds (e.g., "I’m going to" becomes "I’m gonna").
- Get a point across (phr.): Communicate an idea clearly.
- Nice to have (phr.): Something useful but not essential.
- Regional (adj.): Related to a specific area (e.g., "movies with regional accents").
- Like-minded people (phr.): People with similar interests or goals.
Practice Tips
Shadowing the video? Here’s how to make it work for you. First, focus on clarity, not accent. The speaker’s tone is warm and conversational—mimic their pace (not too fast!) and stress on key words (like "understand" or "communicate"). Pause after each sentence and repeat it, making sure each word is distinct. Don’t worry if you have an accent—shadow speak to be understood, not perfect. Next, practice in different "noisy" scenarios. The video mentions background noise in movies—try shadowing while a fan is on or music plays softly. This trains you to speak clearly even when distractions exist. Finally, after shadowing, summarize the main idea aloud: "The video says we don’t need to sound native—we just need to be clear." This helps you "get your point across" in real conversations. Remember, tools like shadowing sites or learning English with videos are most effective when you focus on what matters: being understood. You’ve got this—every practice session brings you closer to confident communication!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've been living · I've been working |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | were born · be understood · was misplaced |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've grown · I've learned · have worked |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.