How do I improve my English accent?

1. Find out what listeners hear

Most people guess wrong about their own accent. They usually practise the sound they feel embarrassed about and ignore the one that makes listeners ask them to repeat. Accent Sherlock is a free test: you read one short passage aloud for about 20 seconds and it places your English accent on a world map, with a confidence level and the lookalike alternatives. No sign-up. It tells you which patterns in your speech are strong enough for a machine to notice, which is close to what a listener notices.

2. Work on the sounds that give you away

Every first language causes a small set of typical mistakes in English. These are the usual ones:

• th (think, this) becomes t, d, s, z or f. Almost every first language does this.
• r and l merge or swap. Common for Japanese, Korean and some Chinese speakers.
• v and w swap. Common for Hindi, Urdu, German and some Slavic speakers.
• b and v merge. Spanish.
• ship and sheep, the short and long i. Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and many others.
• Final consonants dropped or softened: "wan" for "want". Vietnamese, Cantonese, Thai, Portuguese.
• Word stress on the wrong syllable, which hurts understanding more than any single consonant.

Choose three of them, not seven. Three sounds practised every day make a real difference to how people hear you. In Mimica this is the Mimic mode: a short phrase, your attempt, the sounds that shifted highlighted, and a plain-language explanation of what moved and why.

3. Hear the fix in your own voice

The reference recording in most apps is a stranger. You hear the difference and conclude that you cannot sound like that person. That is true, but it is not the point. Mimica's Voice Mirror clones your voice on the phone in a few seconds and plays your own sentence back with clear English rhythm, vowels and stress, in your own timbre. The target becomes a clearer version of you instead of someone else. The voice profile never leaves your device.

4. Use it in conversation, daily

If you can make a sound in a drill but not in a sentence, you have not learned it yet. The last step is talking: roleplay scenes with a goal, characters who keep you speaking, and a tutor who reacts to what you say. Five minutes a day works better than an hour on Sunday, because the new mouth movement needs to be repeated often. Mimica's Free plan is exactly five minutes of speaking a day, which is enough for one Mimic group and one short scene.

What not to do

• Do not try to copy a whole accent. Work on being clear.
• Do not practise silently. Reading about a sound does not train the muscles that make it.
• Do not record yourself once and give up. The first recording always sounds worse than you expected. By the fifth one, it sounds much better.

Questions people ask