62. English Pronunciation And Mindset Tips with Hadar Shemesh

<p>Listen to this podcast episode that will help you with your English pronunciation.</p> <p>Let me introduce Hadar Shemesh. Hadar is an accent coach specializing in American English.</p> <p>She has helped thousands of students to reduce their accent, speak with better fluency, And most importantly, to build confidence to speak in English.</p> <p>In this episode, we discuss the obsession that students with 'sounding like a native' and the mindset changes that need to happen to protect your confidence.</p> <p> </p> English Confidence And Pronunciation Tips with Hadar Shemesh <p> </p> <p>Transcription Amy: How are you doing today?</p> <p>Hadar: Hi, Amy. How are you doing?</p> <p>Amy: I'm really great, thanks. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm really excited to talk to you.</p> <p>Hadar: Me too. It's such an honor to be here. Thank you for inviting me.</p> <p>Amy: Great. So today we were going to be discussing a little bit about pronunciation, but I think one of the first things that we should talk about is really dealing with this belief that so many students have where they feel that they need to speak and sound exactly like a native speaker. Is this something that you have in your students where they're always mentioning this? Do you hear it a lot?</p> <p>Hadar: Well, absolutely, I think it's a big part of the conversation and a bit a big part of the journey where people believe that if they work on their pronunciation or their accent, then the end goal is to sound like a native.</p> <p>Hadar: And I find it not only very problematic socially and politically, I also think it's detrimental to fluency. I think it's not serving the learner, but instead is just getting in the way. And I'll explain because this idea of sounding like a native means that they really need to work on the nuances of speech. Right, to get to a level.</p> <p>Hadar: So there is the basic level where you may sound unclear because you're bringing patterns from your native language into English, which preven