Voice-Over with Hollywood Movies

To speak like a native speaker, you need to act it out like one as often as you can, before it starts to sound naturally to you.

Acting? All right, you don't have to be on stage in school performing Shakespeare classics and pretending you are Romeo or Julia; just rent your favorite Hollywood movie, turn on the English subtitle, and do the voice-over as if you were Tom Hanks, or Meryl Streep, or whoever do the talking on the scene.

Watch how this Japanese did it with On Any Given Sunday:

(Here is the original. Gosh, how I admire and love Al Pacino's signature rhetoric! )

This guy also did voice-over with The Matrix and Independence Day. Sure, he needs to work on his accent harder. And the trace of an accent may stay with him no matter how hard he tries. But as long as he does it long enough, he will speak English with a natural rhythm and tone as a native speaker.

I wish I had done it much earlier. I had an easy excuse, though: in the late 80s, VCR in the Chinese households was as rare as panda in the wild.

On top of it, the authority did a much better job to protect original Hollywood movies from falling to our hands than to protect pandas from falling to the hunter's traps.