The best way to improve pronunciation

 The best way to improve pronunciation

Many adults have the mistaken impression that the best way to learn a language is to
learn naturally, just as a child does. However, employing a child’s language learning
style is not doable. Children have infinite time to try out new language. If people do
not understand them, they simply try and try again until they get what they want.
Adults will not acquire language as readily because they are inhibited by social and
psychological constraints. Furthermore, some experts think that children are wired
for language, and that, as one grows older, it becomes biologically more difficult to
acquire a language naturally (because the brain loses the ability to make new
connections). The good thing is that adults, unlike small children, can readily deduce
and learn language rules. So any good language pronunciation course should
combine naturalistic methods (listening, guessing, trying out new things, etc.) and
rules (explanations of what to do with your mouth, explanations of how sounds
change based on their positions, etc.). Adults can and do benefit from some explicit
rule-based instruction.

Your native language does affect your accent. Often times, adults adjust English to
make it sound more like their native language.
Working on individual sounds is not the most important thing you can do to improve
your accent; the most important thing you can do to improve your accent is to work
on your prosody. Prosody is the larger patterns of a language, like rhythm,
tone/intonation, and pausing. Prosody varies from language to language, and in
English, prosody is used to convey emotion.