3 tips for sounding like a native speaker

I would add three things to the video:
1. Adam, you mentioned the dʒ sound (d+y), but you forgot to add also important sound — tʃ (t+y), which you can often hear when people say “what you” or “that you”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr2BePfVll8

2. The next thing is silent “t” in words like “internet”, “interview”, “center”, etc. I’ve noticed that you pronounced “t” in the word “internet”. And I’m thinking about the word you wrote on the board — “interesting”. It also has “nt”, but I don’t recall if someone ever said this word without “t”. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9ACQRcTvlI

3. Also it’s very important to know what a “flap t” is. For instance, when the letter “t” is between two vowels. Adam, you pronounced it in the phrase “not at all”, even twice. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUupfHhOnHg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FDjhKY8HwM

Adam, you didn’t pronounce “r” in “comfortable”, but Americans in the states do it. They also shorten the word to three syllables, so they say it like this: [‘kʌmf dəɹ bəl] , and I also do it in this way, but you know, I’m mostly interested in American pronunciation, so I hear it all the time, and I got used to it. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWNySmK01fg

I also wanted to ask about the difference between “besides” and “anyway”? After you told me I made that mistake, I went to ask google this question, and I found some things to discuss about. First of all, two links:

http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/ask-teacher/157157-besides-anyway.html
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2247707&langid=21

There are some examples:

•They didn’t have any trainers in my size, and [besides/anyway] I’d already decided I’d rather save the money.
•I need the money. And [besides/anyway], when I agree to do something, I do it.
•I don’t want to go to the cinema with him! [Besides/Anyway], I’ve already seen this film.
•Mother certainly won’t let him stay with her and [besides/anyway] he wouldn’t.

The question was: which one should be used in the statements above. The answer was:

“Both are possible in all your sentences with virtually the same meaning – suggesting that what went before is not important.”

I know that the two words are used when you want to add something to your previous thought, but I see them in this way:

Let’s say that we are talking about a problem, and you’re trying to explain me the thing that I don’t get. After an hour, you would give up, and I would say “I still don’t get it. Anyway, thanks for help.”. You were trying, but you’ve failed, so that’s why I would use “anyway”. :)

Now “besides”. Reading your previous comment, I wondered — why didn’t I use the “btw” shortcut? I should’ve used it, and now it’s obvious to me. Anyway, this doesn’t matter now. In the example with problem to be solved, I said I would use “anyway”, but I wouldn’t use “besides” there. Would you agree? In my mind “besides” and “anyway” mean “in addition to something mentioned before”, but now I’m not sure if I can use it in not related topics. So, if we go back to previous comment, I used “besides” to show that in addition to what I wrote in that comment, I wanted to thank you for the hint you gave me in the other comment.

The other thing is: if you look at the four examples I gave, and if you agree that we can use either one of the two words, so when you would preffer to use “besides” and “anyway”?

I have two more questions:

1. I noticed that when someone puts the letter “a” before a noun, it sometimes sounds differently. I’m not sure if something affects the sound but normally people pronounce it as /ɑː/ (I think) but sometimes they make /eɪ/ sound. I don’t know what I should think about this. Could it be that people just interchange them?

2. This is about the word “me”. People usually pronounce it like /mi/ , but I have some songs in which it’s pronounced more like /meɪ/ . I have a guy who sang the same song twice — once in album version and the second one was a live performance, and the pronunciation was different in each of those two cases. So, /mi/ or /meɪ/ should I choose, or maybe both are acceptable?

Actually, I have another question, I know, I know, too many, but I really love this topic. :) Adam, you said that when one word ends with the same consonant that the other word begins, we should drop the first one, but what if the first word ends with “t” or “d” and the second one starts with voiced or unvoiced “th”?