How to improve your pronunciation in any language, and how to tell if it’s good

A method that works for any language

1. Step 1

   Listen before you speak

   Spend time with native audio of the exact words you are learning: dictionary recordings, slowed-down clips, podcasts for learners. You cannot produce a contrast you cannot hear, so for each new sound, first make sure you can tell it apart from the sound you would say instead.

2. Step 2

   Isolate the sounds that give you away

   Every language has a handful of sounds your first language does not have, and they cause most of your accent: English th and short vowels, Spanish r and rr, French nasal vowels and u, German ü and ch, Russian soft consonants and ы, Japanese long vowels and small っ, Korean plain, tense and aspirated consonants, Mandarin tones and zh/j. Learn how each one is made (tongue, lips, airflow, voicing), not just what it sounds like.

3. Step 3

   Drill minimal pairs

   A minimal pair is two words that differ in one sound only: ship/sheep, pero/perro, dessus/dessous, 知 zhī/鸡 jī. Listen to both, say both, and have someone (or a scorer) tell you which one you said. Pairs train your ear and your mouth at the same time, and they show progress clearly.

4. Step 4

   Shadow whole phrases

   Play a short native phrase and speak along with it, a fraction of a second behind, copying the rhythm, linking and melody as well as the sounds. Start slowed down, then at full speed. Shadowing is how the sounds you drilled survive in connected speech.

5. Step 5

   Record yourself and compare

   Record the same phrase you just shadowed and play it right after the native version. You will hear things you never notice while speaking. Keep the recordings: listening to one from a month ago is the most convincing proof of progress.

6. Step 6

   Get feedback that names the sound

   Your own ear stops improving at the point where it cannot hear the difference. A teacher, a patient native speaker or a per-sound scorer can tell you which sound in which word slipped, which a “try again” or a whole-word right/wrong cannot. Fix one sound per session.

7. Step 7

   Review on a spaced schedule

   A sound you fixed today comes back in a week if you stop practising it. Keep a short list of the words you miss and review them a day later, then a few days later, then a week later, until they pass without thinking. Ten minutes a day works better than an hour once a week.

How to tell if your pronunciation is good

“Good” does not mean “no accent”. It means people understand you easily, on the first try, and the sounds that change meaning in the language are there. Five ways to check, from free to most complete:

• The intelligibility test. The question that matters is whether you are understood on the first try. Ask a native speaker to write down what you said without seeing the text, or dictate a few sentences to your phone’s speech-to-text keyboard set to that language. Words that come back wrong point at the sounds to fix. A speech recogniser is stricter than a person in some ways and more forgiving in others, so use it as a hint, not a grade.
• Recording yourself next to native audio. Free and always available. You are the judge, which works well for rhythm and for sounds you can already hear, and poorly for the sounds you cannot hear yet, which are exactly the ones you most need to fix.
• Native or teacher feedback. The most complete check: a person hears sounds, rhythm, intonation and word stress, and can explain what to change. A teacher who knows your first language can predict your errors. Ask specific questions (“Did I say ship or sheep?”) rather than “Was that good?”, because people are polite.
• Automatic pronunciation scoring. A pronunciation scorer compares each sound you recorded with a model of native speech and returns a score per word or per sound. It is available any time, is consistent, and points at the exact sound. Its limits: a noisy room, a clipped start or a whisper can lower a score; scores are measured against one standard variety; and many scorers, TonePerfect included, do not score sentence intonation. Treat a score as a pointer to the sound to practise, not as a verdict on your accent.
• Minimal-pair self-test. Record a minimal pair, then play it back to a native speaker or a scorer in random order. If they cannot tell which word you meant, the contrast is not there yet, however good each word sounds on its own.

Which apps actually score pronunciation, and at what depth (a word marked right or wrong, a score per word, a score per sound, or a human listening)? See which language apps grade your pronunciation, with sources.

By language: what to work on, and a free test

Each test below runs in the browser with no signup: record a few words, get them scored, and see which sounds to practise. The language guides explain how each sound is made.