Help! I think my accent really sucks!

The shuttering maybe because of your shy when you meet new people but i wouldn't beat yourself up too much you have won prizes after all :)

If you are in college, or can take a college class, a speech class might help. Other things that help are to participate in singing activities, because for instance in church choir we over articulate to make things clear. You can watch videos of people who speak the way you would like to, and you can video tape or record just the speech of yourself, speaking, and pick one item to concentrate on at a time, or one word. In my college speech class I had a friend who always said "probly" instead of probably--we worked on a list of one hundred most mispronounced words. You need to form new habits, maybe one or two words at a time. You cannot really break a bad habit, you need to replace it with a good habit.

Well don't take it hard on yourself..You would be able to get online trainings to learn a good neutral accent..snoop around. Besides, when reading your news papers read it out loud everyday for 15 to 20 minutes everyday..I've trained a couple of batches in an outsourced company until i moved to management..Actually, you can learn more faster if you have a trainer in person.

You may think that what you're facing right now is a challenge but as a matter of fact you already won half the battle that's because you already know your weakness. And if you know your weakness then you can already address it or at least with some help. If you can't pronounce words properly, that's because you are not using it on a daily basis and that's quite normal. To address your problem, all you have to do is practice. As they say practice makes perfect, you can do it alone or with a friend.

Hi nameless, For the record i too cant pronounce any word properly coz my mother tongue is Urdu, not English, not just English but some native language and i have been subjected to lot of criticism for my accent with native language, but what we do, this is our own way of speaking and our voice, it does sound different from those Hollywood actor or Britisher, but i am trained in that way... I think we have the native accent in our way of pronunciation, and to answer your other question, people dont talk to you because of your accent or how good you pronouns some words, it because you are person they look up to...and hold some value in their life..i personally believe that i would only talk to a person who has something interesting to talk about not just fancy words or cool accent...so if people are talking to you be grateful for that and be happy because this means that you are an intelligent person in that field or important to that person who values your opinion..

Pronunciation is a very important part of any language. It’s actually very impressive that you noticed the problem and actually took time to record yourself because to with some people this problem goes unnoticed. There is but one thing that works magic with pronunciation problems, watch at least two or three English movies a week and with time your pronunciation will slowly adopt to what your ears keeps hearing.

The good thing is you know there is a problem. The best resort is to go to the website named the free online dictionary to check out the correct pronunciation and practice in front of the mirror. This will help you a lot.

In my opinion nobody should look down on you because of your accent, it's you who learned their language. It takes a lot of practice to have a "perfect" accent, if something like that exists. Please don't get discouraged, I think the best is to just listen and practice. It doesn't help, but I have a weird accent too. When I went to English speaking countries, I kept getting the questions from people what language I spoke, and if i understood what they were saying. I had to tell them that I'm fine and don't need a translator, but using my native language with them would be more difficult. I didn't feel discriminated because of it, rather found them nice because they wanted to make sure I understood them.