Language teacher Hadar Shemesh argues that chasing native-speaker pronunciation is the wrong goal. Instead, focus on feeling like yourself in the language, comfortable and authentic, rather than performing someone else's accent or style.
I always say to my students, and you know that learning a second language is a personal development journey. There's so much growth, and if you don't— you're not willing to do the thought work and recognizing what it does to you, you are not going to get to that ideal experience of feeling like a native speaker, right? I hate it when we say, oh, sound like a native speaker. No, but like, what does it mean to feel like a native speaker? It means that you are in your skin. You feel like— And you feel like yourself.
Yeah. whatever language you speak. And I think that's the ideal, and this is what we are doing here. When you say, oh, I want to sound like a native speaker, yeah, I never thought about that. Like, what you're really saying is, I just want to feel like me.
Yeah, like I was born into that language, and it doesn't need to be perfect, doesn't need to be fancy. Yeah, it's just— it's good.
Read Out Loud with me! Dare to Lead by Brené Brown | Pronunciation & Vocabulary practice
