Kjellin (2015) is my main source, but I've heard a lot of other creators in the language learning space advocate for this strategy of accent acquisition.
For those not in the know, shadowing (or sometimes chorusing; some people use "shadowing" to mean "repeating on a delay" while some use both to mean "repeating without a delay") is the practice of speaking along with native audio in order to develop a more natural accent; the particular method advocated for in that paper is to have a relatively small number of sentences that roughly cover all the different sounds in your target language, which you practice a lot.
(Note that the benefits from this are nominally distinct from studying pitch accent; I'm also taking Dogen's course, and while it's obviously super helpful and I'm still just starting it (so this might change), pitch accent is a big enough topic that I feel like "lower hanging fruit" like prosody/pronunciation get de-emphasized as a result, which it seems like shadowing would shore up.)
Preferably, it would all be from the same speaker (I think it's MattVsJapan that advocates for finding a "parent" whose voice you like and seek to imitate), but I'm not sure who would be a good source. For me (an adult male) female speakers are out, and I have the impression that audio from anime/dramas/TV presenters might sound a bit overacted, but my comprehension isn't at the point where I can tell if a speaker sounds unnatural unless it's something obvious like battle shounen acting.
Does anyone know of a good place to get high-quality, natural sounding native audio or even just the name of some public figures that might be a good match for a mid-20s man with a somewhat deep voice whose speaking I could edit down into shadowing practice?
If I feel like shadowing is helpful, I might make the resulting sentences available on Mega or something, since I'm fairly certain my age/gender is like the #1 demographic on this sub and audio that works for me would likely be helpful for others as well.
by summetria