The best way to acquire a native speaker’s accent singing along with pop songs. When you sing, you go into repetition that serves as a fun drill until such time it’s easy for you to go along with the connected speech. Let’s take a look at how a connected speech works. This is a no-brainer in mimicking native speakers.

Types of blending / Connected Speech
1. Catenation

Pronunciation practice can be fun through pop songs. If you want to sound like a native, why not try ‘blending’ or connected speech? Check out an excerpt of Dua Lipa’s song: “Don’t Start Now”Merge your speech by linking the final consonant sound and the initial vowel sound of the next word, and it’s called catenation.

2. Elision

The basic principle of removing excess sounds to keep the connected speech flowing is called Elision.

3. Intrusion

Fluent speakers normally insert a subtle consonant sound between words that have final and initial vowel sounds. *When a word ends with any of these vowel sounds /aɪ/, /iː/, or /ɛ/, and the next word begins with a vowel sound, they often insert a /j or the y sound/ (see example A).

*When a word ends with any of these vowel sounds  /oʊ/ or /uː/, and the next word begins with a vowel sound, they often insert a /w/ (see example B)

4. Assimilation

The combination of preceding consonant sounds results in a slight change of the combined words.

t + y = ch
d + y = ‘hard’ j

/s/ + /y/ = /ʃ/

We hope you have enjoyed practicing pronunciation through the connected speech. Every now and then, find ways on making your English learning fun. Pop songs could increase your language practice.

Source :https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/pop-songs-connected-speech-fluent-english