How can language learners improve their pronunciation in English?

[TowerOfKnowledge]

From my experience there are methods that are even better than listening to movies and song because... People speaking there are never perfect. They just have... their own accents. So it can be pretty ridiculous to study English by, for example, old cassettes and CD's... Never helped me to get a better pronunciation, just managed to better differentiate bad accents...

The best option in studying languages is getting help from professionals. It's true. Like, I've been getting help with my homework on https://homework-lab.com/, was really useful when I was struggling and couldn't find mistakes myself. Also, it's cool when it's possible to study remotely.

So, I'd say the best advice is to never try to do everything on your own. You could just keeping bad habits and not able to realize your full potential.

[Jianna]

Hi! If you want to lose an accent, get elocution lessons. If you don't want to pay, live somewhere else for a bit and talk to a lot of people and listen carefully to the way they talk. Mimic basically or go on youtube but honestly I love Irish accents. I have a typical London one. Look also here for more info.

[Harriet Andrews]

It seems to me that there is no single method that would be effective for everyone. When my first teachers tried to teach me, I was completely not interested in learning English, so I ignored all the advice and comments. Communication with native speakers helped me a lot. You hear an example and you can ask to be corrected. But if you ask grademiners they will find millions of ways because they wrote really cool essays for me!

[yong321]

Many people have suggested listening to native speakers and living in the country where the language is spoken. Note that as an adult, we have largely lost the innate capability of learning the native accent by listening. This loss is said to start around the age of 7 (but various researches say it differently). Being able to discern the difference in other people's pronunciation is always easier than being able to utter it yourself, even for a child. Although some adults have remarkable talent in mimicking unfamiliar sounds, many don't. For example, many Chinese Americans still pronounce "mug" as /mag/ (where /a/ is the the first part of the diphthong /aɪ/ in "high") instead of /mʌɡ/, even though they have listened to the native speakers for decades. They can tell the difference between the correct /mʌɡ/ and the wrong /mag/ when listening. But they have trouble in speech production. How can they improve? My suggestion is to carefully studying International Phonetic Alphabet, or at least the vowel graph of it, combined with focused listening and self-practice.