Rhythm Matters More Than Sounds

You can pronounce every English sound perfectly and still sound foreign. The missing piece is rhythm. English is a stress-timed language, meaning some syllables are long and loud while others are short and swallowed. Languages like Spanish, French, and Japanese give each syllable roughly equal weight.

Think of English as music. Every sentence has a beat. "I WENT to the STORE and BOUGHT some BREAD" — the capital words carry the beat. The small words between them (to, the, and, some) are compressed, almost swallowed.