My Accent Sample

Hello everyone,

I'd be extremely grateful for anyone's advise on how I could improve my pronunciation. I'm not trying to pick up a particular regional accent of US English. My goal is merely to speak without a distinctive foreign accent and be understood.

Here's where my voice sample can be found:
http://share.ovi.com/media/cppgeek.public/cppgeek.10008

Thanks in advance!

CP, your pronunciation is already very good. There's no trouble understanding you at all and you're already able to pronounce many words without an accent. The only advice I have is to relax your mouth a little bit when you speak. You're pronunciation at some points is a little too prescise. In American English, "T" in the middle of a word is often pronounced like the letter "D". "Ate a bowl of soup" is pronouned like "Ade-a-bowl..." But you're doing great!

Very good. Very clearly understandable. Since that was your objective, 10/10 on that one.

Are you Polish?

Thanks everyone!

My first language is Russian. So Guest's guess wasn't totally off base :)

It sounds awful to me when somebody speaks English with a thick Russian accent. I'm so glad I've been able to reduce mine! The phonetics of the two languages is completely different. So, it's quite hard to master the English pronunciation for a native Russian speaker. Although I'd think that RP is a bit easier because it lacks such typical American English sounds as O in "dog" and T in "letter" or "better".

I have a couple of friends who are from Minsk and both of them speak English with a very good American accent.... with just s very small trace of Russian. Kudos to you.... you have done very well without living in the US or UK. If you were to live in an English speaking country even for a few months I'm sure you would speak better than my friends from Minsk because you've come so far withotu total immersian.