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I'm going through the opposite situation, but hopefully my experience will help. English is my mother tongue, and I immigrated to Israel where the only people who consistently speak English are high-tech workers, cab drivers, and 1 out of every 4 police officers. Of those, only the high-tech workers are in any way fluent. I completed a six-month language program, but I still couldn't speak or even read more than basi…
I'm a native English speaker and one thing that helped me with other languages (let's say French) was the simple-in-retrospect idea of trying to speak French with a French accent. I.e. I know what French-accented English sounds like and I can imitate it, but it was sort of an epiphany to realize that the accent came from native French pronunciation habits. So if I pronounced French words with that same accent, rather…
Yes, from an American-perspective, it felt slightly disrespectful at first to do this, but the results were positive.
English is the hardest to perfect, because of the numerous loan words which defy any systematic rules for correct pronunciation when you read. Then you also have the problem of accents and dialects. Even within a single country there are differences. In the USA: New York vs New Orleans, in the UK: London vs Manchester or Ireland / Scotland.
You could record some TV or radio program, repeat what you hear onto a recording and compare. Best approach would be to get a speech coach. They will explain correct mouth, tongue, etc placements.
I'm a native English speaker and one thing that helped me with other languages (let's say French) was the simple-in-retrospect idea of trying to speak French with a French accent. I.e. I know what French-accented English sounds like and I can imitate it, but it was sort of an epiphany to realize that the accent came from native French pronunciation habits. So if I pronounced French words with that same accent, rather…
I found this to be helpful in talking to non-native speakers as well actually. I lived in Japan for several years (and did not speak Japanese), and noticed that Japanese had many loan words from English whose phonemes had been bent to the more rigid Japanese phonemes. Words like "toilet" and "milk" in Japanese are "toi ray" and "miriku." Turns out there are many more and speaking with a faux-Japanese accent made it n…
If you want to try more academically check out this app from the university of Iowa but it needs studying. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.uiowa.uirf...
Get audio files of spoken English, preferably of someone with a timbre similar to yours (YouTube is a good source, download some videos and extract bits of audio with Audacity). Listen and repeat, initially pausing and repeating after each sentence, then repeating along with the audio. Pay close attention to things like connected speech patterns. After a couple of months of doing this for 30-40 minutes every day I started noticing improvements in my spoken English.
There is some app/web to speak with strangers to learn English? No general chat web, a specific one oriented to learn the language.