
Things I did to improve my English and reduce my accent - goodcharacters
https://service.goodcharacters.com/blog/blog.php?id=175
======
patio11
Having some accidental knowledge of this market:

1) Professional speech therapy is surprisingly inexpensive and mostly sold to
parents, who mostly pay out of pocket (as opposed to via insurance, even
though it is semi-medical).

2) Lots of professionals pay for accent coaching / accent modification, which
can be accomplished by someone with patience, a good ear, good rapport, and no
expensive degree. This is a good part-time job for people with an "in" in a
particular foreign community, by the way. (I'm personally aware of Japanese
executives who spend $X00 an hour for it. Cheap at the price if it gets you
the promotion, right?)

3) Professional translators would suggest shadowing, which is taking source
material (like a news program, video, etc) and just trying to reproduce it
exactly like the original in real time. This is maddeningly difficult the
first several times you do it, but you will get better really quickly. (I tape
myself doing it, which is useful if you want to get e.g. native feedback or
just have a record of progress.)

~~~
thenomad
Shadowing works _remarkably_ well. When I'm doing voice acting for a film (or
indeed, GMing a roleplaying game) and I need an accent I suck at, it's the
most effective technique I've found for rapidly improving the quality of my
accent.

------
honzzz
Great article. I would like to add some more...

1\. I used to watch that American TV series "24" and I tried to repeat
everything Jack Bauer said in the same way he said it... I even tried to mimic
his facial expressions. People say my accent improved and nobody complained
that I speak like a CTU agent. You can pick your favourite character.

2\. There are great services like
[http://livemocha.com/](http://livemocha.com/) \- you can do exercises and you
can record yourself and upload it and native speakers let you know what
mistakes you made - you do the same thing for people trying to learn your
language. And even listening to yourself from the recording helps.

3\. I got rid of the fear. At the beginning I was afraid to talk, I don't even
know why, nobody is ever going to laugh at you. But I learned that foreign
accent can even be good for you... it makes you interesting and it's a
conversation starter - oh, how many of my friends I met after "that's an
interesting accent, where are you from?"

~~~
chiph
_You can pick your favourite character._

Please don't pick anyone from the show "My Name is Earl".

~~~
honzzz
Actually this is a real problem - sometimes it might be difficult for
foreigners to recognize that some words or sayings have a certain subtext or
are vulgar or somehow inappropriate. I remember some very embarrassing
situations caused by this.

~~~
rdl
Why not use professional-topic audiobooks, then?

------
Udo
We're conflating deficiencies with theoretical knowledge about a language on
the one hand and vocal motor skills on the other. Those should really be
handled differently, and neither issue is well described by the word "accent".

Maybe this will sound familiar to someone.

I confess I have an accent. I don't necessarily recognize myself in the pg
article that started it all. Most of my dialogue is in English, on average
about 70% maybe. I don't think I have problems picking up subtle verbal clues.

Here's the thing though: after talking in German for a few hours, my English
pronunciation get completely destroyed (the same thing happens vice-versa,
though not it's usually not that bad). And when I get tired, my speech sounds
more like "lurrr-burrrr rurrr-jurrr" than a human language.

On the other hand, I'm probably somewhat hindered by the fact that most of my
communication happens with other non-native speakers, such as Scandinavian or
Asian people. My writing skills are somewhat terrible as well, but in any
language.

Anyway, this whole hubbub has got me thinking: should I do something or not?
I'd like to think there are way worse speakers out there, and on the whole I
get pretty good results at my job, but of course that doesn't mean things
shouldn't be improved. I'm just having trouble deciding how bad it really is.
I also can't really tell whether I'm improving or not.

~~~
Uberphallus
As a Spanish, English, Portuguese and French speaker I completely agree, but
I'd add there are too many sides in this issue.

I notice there's a context switch every time I switch language that destroys
grammar and pronunciation. I get back to "cruise" proficiency in about 30 min
to 1 hour. except for my native language.

I'd advise you to look for conversation with natives, as I've noticed I dumb
down my pronunciation and expression due to the low English level of my
coworkers, and every time I hit a Brit and have some beers it feels refreshing
and like a different language.

------
D9u
I tend to not discount people's English language acumen when English is not
their primary language.

Think about it. How many English speakers are fluent in more than one
language, or, like myself, are barely literate in our primary language?

I deal with people from all over the world, and am always impressed by people
who can converse in my primary language as well as I am able, and those who
may have small difficulties with syntax, etc, are still able to convey their
ideas to me despite many language shortcomings.

------
melling
HN at its best. Someone (pg) mentions that people with strong accents tend to
have problems building start-ups. We have a brief rant about how he's not
"politically correct." Finally, someone offers a way to help solve the
problem, followed up by other helpful comments.

------
honzzz
I live in Brno in the Czech Republic where many American companies have their
branches and they employ many Americans. Some of them had the great idea to
organize weekly English parties where they can socialize - but they made it
open, anybody can come, not only Americans. It's such a great way to improve
your English while meeting new interesting people.

The idea was so successful here that the Facebook group has already more than
3000 people and now we also have Spanish parties and many other languages are
starting to get traction. It's actually getting a bit out of hand - last
English party was attended by so many people that we did not fit into the
restaurant they booked for us, many people were drinking and talking on a
sidewalk in front of the pub and I am afraid we were so loud that someone
called the cops. That's what I call great language-learning opportunity.

------
egeozcan
The propaganda against our differences is disturbing me. AFAIK, there's no
"accent-free" dialect of any language. If some people can't understand you
because of your accent, and if it's important to communicate with them you
can, of course, push yourself a bit as long as they do the same. If nobody can
understand you because of your grammar, than that's another story.

~~~
kokey
It's been quite ironic to me. 'losing an accent' or rather, 'gaining an
American accent' to 'speak English', or rather 'American English'. That said,
I've seen people from the USA move to England and over several years they
started speaking better English with less of an accent.

~~~
duaneb
Less of an American accent? Surely their English would be unchanged but for
vocabulary; it's not like grammar differs.

Anyway, just because a country is a language's namesake does not indicate
anything but history. A language is a dialect with an army, so perhaps we
should rename it American. Names of languages are arbitrary.

~~~
stan_rogers
Grammar _does_ differ, though, in subtle ways that don't necessarily impede
communication but that mark the speaker for region. The participle _gotten_ is
probably the most prominent example; it is essentially unknown in most British
English varieties and tense construction has more irregularities in British
English than it tends to have in US English. (We Canadians speak both and
neither, and nobody really knows the rules from day to day. They change on a
pseudorandom sort of schedule covered by the Security of Information Act, and
those in charge will neither tell us what's going on nor reveal their
identities.)

------
abraxasz
I'm originally from France, and I used three methods to improve my english: 1)
Reading in english. back in high school, when I was still a beginner, my go-to
books in english were the Harry Potter series: not because I have a particular
fancy for the books, but because I'd already read them in French so I could
guess the meaning of most words without a dictionary. I actually extended this
method to Spanish and Latin, pretty successfully.

2) Watch movies. I started with french subtitles, then switched to english
subtitles. I stayed with english subtitles for quite a while as I thought I
wasn't ready to remove them. Then I spent 6 months abroad and did not have
access to subtitles, so I was forced to watch movies in english without
subtitles. I had to replay a lot of scenes on my first couple tries, but
picked it up quickly.

3) The single most important thing I did to improve my english is .. to stop
speaking french. That's right. I've been leaving in the US for about 2 years
now, and I avoid french speaking people like the plague. And if for some
reason I can't avoid it, then I speak english with them. No french. See, a lot
of the foreigners I've seen who struggle with the language tend to stick with
other foreigners from their country. That's the worst possible thing to do if
you want to improve your english. I've seen people who've been in the US for 8
years and can still barely speak english: they don't need to since they almost
never actually speak it in their community.

Now I don't know if that works for everyone. I've met a couple other people
who've used a similar strategy, and obtained similar results, but that's still
not a very large sample.

~~~
jusob
3/ Is not possible when you have kids and want to teach them your native
languages. I have to speak French every at home, this is the only opportunity
for my kids to hear this language.

------
dodyg
Jezz, this is bullshit - you already have to learn English, now you have to
improve your accent, then you have to look certain way. Stop following the
moving goal posts.

I don't know where "strong accents correlate to business comes from".

People are building amazing companies all around the world - with or without
'proper English accent'. Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Japan build super
successful organizations and high GDP with terrible English accents.

Damn people, don't let people make you feel inferior.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Yes, it's very helpful to have it be easy to understand you. If you don't like
that, go live in a different universe.

~~~
dodyg
Accent has little to do with the ability to communicate clearly.

~~~
bane
In some cases it does. There are accents, even among English-as-a-first-
language speakers that are almost unintelligible.

For example, many Americans struggle to understand the kind of English accent
used by some recent immigrants from India -- immigrants who by and large speak
perfect English.

Grammar might be perfect, but thick accents can be a tremendous impedance to
communication.

In these cases it can be even worse since the speaker _knows_ they're speaking
correctly, but just can't make themselves understood, even in basic
conversations. Accent training is the perfect and only solution.

~~~
raverbashing
Correct. Let me add Ireland as a good example of that as well

~~~
draugadrotten
I often get to translate what my Brisbane colleagues are saying to my Seattle
colleagues. I'm from Europe and not a native English speaker. I suppose it
makes me more indifferent to thick accents. However, Danish accents are too
severe even for me.

------
whiddershins
One thing I found can be helpful is to imitate a native speaker, as if you are
doing an impression of them. I think there is a part of us which remaps
phenomes from a foreign language in to our mother tongue, which creates the
accent. However, if you imagine you are mimicing someone, like a comedian, a
different mental process happens and you replicate more of the nuances.

When I was trying to learn Mandarin I had the good fortune to get instruction
from a friend who is a native speaker and a concert pianist.

In order to teach the tones (chinese uses pitch to make vocabulary
distinctions) she convinced me to sing the words. She literally wrote the
tones out on staff paper (i am also a musician) and i treated the phrases as
little songs. It worked surprisingly well.

I realized that it was really hard to make myself speak that way. I felt
ridiculous singing at people. In a certain sense it felt artificial, as if I
was making fun of them. But I think that is what it takes to start the process
of speaking new sounds. You have to let go of "your" voice and "your" way of
speaking, which is rooted in your native language's sound, and almost assume a
character who sounds like a different person.

Full disclosure: I don't remember much Mandarin anymore. But if i were
learning Spanish I would try the same thing. I would imagine myself as a
Spanish dude and "put on a Spanish accent" as if I were acting in a movie.

------
bane
Some anecdotes, my half-sister and I pick up new accents in a couple of weeks.
She used to go split time between her mother in the south and my parents and
she'd come back to us with a rich accent full of local colloquialisms. We'd
send her back a few weeks later wearing our accents and colloquialisms.

I've found that I subconsciously do the same thing. For example, I spent a
couple weeks in Australia for business and came back saying "How ya goin'",
"mate", "cheers", "no worries", "good on ya" that sort of thing for a day or
so till I readapted. Same thing for other countries a bit, but native English
countries are the worst. I came back from a month in Ireland with a
transitional accent that took me a full week to shake off.

My wife is South Korean and over the years I've adopted her Konglishisms and
we communicate (very effectively I might add) in a kind of pidgin which does
absolutely nothing to help her accent and grammar struggles. She actually
doesn't know I do it, because I've somehow managed to fit my patterns into
that weird gap where Korean doesn't translate into English -- e.g. I'll use
singular nouns instead of plural nouns since Korean doesn't make any
distinction.

It's also kind of embarrassing in group gatherings when I'll revert to pidgin
with her and then a more normal English with somebody else. I actually can't
help it, it's like an automatic code-switch that I have to actively suppress.
I can feel myself, almost out of my control, measuring the other speaker and
adapting my speech patterns to theirs. Entire swaths of vocabulary and
idiomatic phrases will move into and out of my working memory like slippery
bars of wet soap as I change groups of people.

When I worked a sales job, I'd use a brief conversation to try and adapt to
the customer's style of speech. I started using sales-y phrases and when I'd
come back to talk to engineering I had to code-switch to talk to the
engineers, and sometimes translating from the code I was just in to the one I
was in now would feel like doing heavy math.

I actually can't force it either. I can't dredge back up forgotten accents. I
can't go "Australian" or "Irish" or "Konglish" when I'm not in those milieus.
It's bizarre and kind of troubling at the same time. I grew up in a heavily
multi-cultural area and wonder if this is an artifact of that upbringing.

My father on the other hand was born and raised with a deep American country
accent. In 1949, When he was 16 he ran away from home and went to live in a
major metropolitan city with its own rich accent tapestry. Unfortunately, his
country accent marked him in the kinds of negative ways that country accents
do in cities and he struggled finding good jobs, good friends, etc.. It took
him a couple years of daily study to shed his accent and turn it into a
"neutral" middle American one and this stuck with him to this day. He actually
is unable to revert to his childhood accent (my mother has asked him many
times). Fortunately, he has a number of brothers, most of whom kept their
original regional accent...with 1 other exception.

My uncle fell hopelessly in love with a Puerto Rican woman who was unable to
overcome deep cultural differences in the U.S. They married, and he moved with
her back home and stayed till they both passed on. He had a thick Puerto Rican
accent and spoke Puerto Rican Spanish at home. He claimed that he had lived
there so long that he no longer thought in English, but the local Spanish
dialect. His children are decently bilingual, but their children are not.

It reminds me a bit of James Dresnok. He was one of the few American defectors
to North Korea. There's a couple astonishing documentaries about him
("Crossing the Line" and "An American in North Korea"). In his interviews he
speaks in English, with much of his original Richmond, Virginia accent intact.
His English has become a bit stilted over the years, due to lack of use no
doubt. He's not nearly as interesting as his son, a blond haired blue eyed man
born and raised in North Korea, with Korean as his native tongue. When he
speaks English, if I close my eyes, he has a Korean accent. It's kind of mind
blowing.

My wife is a fan of Project Runway, and a few seasons ago they had a
contestant (Anya Ayoung-Chee) on from the West Indies. I heard her before I
saw her and recognized the accent, hearing it on in the other room and having
grown up with a few friends from there. Then one day I watched the show with
her and was shocked to see that this contestant was ethnically Asian. It was
fascinating watching her talk, and expecting the normal kind of Asian-
speaking-Englishisms, but instead getting a rich accent from Trinidad.

There's also a family friend who's nearing retirement. Also from South Korea
but who speaks almost flawless English (except for a few small insurmountable
details), we had a conversation about people's perceptions of foreigners based
on their accents. She said that over the years, and she's seen this a number
of times, foreigners who come and start to perfect their English reach a kind
of uncanny valley where, as their proficiency nears native speaker levels, the
small things they still do wrong are magnified. Most of them actually forcibly
regress their proficiency because they find they get treated better. She said
that they feel like having a worse accent makes people perceive them as a
smart foreigner who learned another language rather than a stupid native
speaker who can't talk right.

Finally my wife, she's struggled mightily with this specific topic. From her
largely unpronounceable-to-Americans name to working in a professional setting
with largely Americans. For a while she dealt with this by getting a very good
job with other East Asians doing development work. But she's found herself
working with 100% Americans recently and feels very overwhelmed by it all.
She's very outgoing and conversational, and people warm up to her quickly. But
they rapidly overestimate her English proficiency. Her accent hasn't exactly
faded over the years, but she's managed to make herself _just_ clear enough
that 95% of people understand her 95% of the time.

Even after 15 years, she still confused pronouns, plurals, articles and
particles and other basic English. She reads English books for an hour or so
every day for practice, and our conversations are filled with small
corrections from me on minor points of grammar, or explanations of idioms or
slang. She also hyper corrects Koreanisms, and turns words with "p"'s into
words with "f"s (Korean doesn't have an "f", so when they loan-in words that
do, they typically use a "p" or and "h" sound, turning "fighting" into
"hwighting", she's simply reversing this). I've had to reverse translate lots
of questions where she's looking for a "fan" to do some cooking.

The truth is, she just doesn't have an ear for languages. She gets by, very
competently and proficiently I'd add, by keeping her sentences simple and
conversational. But it definitely has profound effects for her in formal
business situations. She'll get nervous and fall back to polite-Korean-
towards-seniors behavior while speaking English -- nervous smiles at
everything and an almost pathological inability to have more than simple
conversations involving basic greetings, on topics that she's an expert in.
It's excruciating to watch, seeing all this brilliance locked up by language
barriers.

I _know_ she's highly intelligent, and we spend many late nights going over
slides and papers for her work, fixing grammar issues here and there, letting
her practice lectures and presentations.

It's tough, language is tough, and it's taught me that people with accents
should be listened to extra carefully because they may just have some real
smarts in them, screaming to get out.

~~~
keywonc
Wow, I'm a South Korean married to an American, and I've been in the US for 15
years too. Your comment is fascinating. I'm gonna have to devise some tests to
see which pidgins my husband is sneaking into his English when he talks to me!

The switching back-and-forth in social occasions worries me -- it may be all
good intentions, but I want to have better contol over how the 3rd party may
perceive us/me.

It is definitely interesting to hear the observations from the native
partner's point of view, and the "coping" stories from the other side :) Thank
you.

------
Asla
Why do i tend to think think that people should be proud of their accent,...in
any case your problem was that you didn't know enough english and not your
accent

~~~
pqs
Yes! All these articles about English knowledge are incorrectly centred in the
accent. Accents are not a problem! The problem is the language: the
vocabulary, the grammar and the syntax. Of course, if the accent is so strong
that nobody can't understand you, you'll be in trouble, but, in general, the
main problem is not the accent, it's the knowledge of the language itself.

~~~
pfortuny
This is it: bad grammar is not "accent." Not using (or overusing) the article
"the" is bad grammar, for instance. And a bad pronuntiation is not accent, it
is a mistake (there is a difference between hearing a French pronouncing "ze
book" and another one saying "the book" but with difficulty; the former is
making a mistake, the latter has an accent.

~~~
honzzz
It's funny that you mention it - I would say that using "the", "a" and "an"
might be the most difficult task for me when I try to speak English. I tried
to learn the rules but it seems to me that there are so many rules with so
many exceptions that I am unable to get it right - it feels overwhelming and I
am never sure whether I used it right or not. I cannot grasp the concept
intuitively. Any trick to overcome this would be greatly appreciated.

~~~
Uberphallus
What's your native language? It's weird since all the languages I know have a
form of the/a/an.

If you think it's hard in English, don't try to learn German then, grammatical
cases are a pain in the butt.

~~~
polymatter
Chinese Mandarin has no the/a/an, and I believe most languages from the Sino-
Tibetan family do the same. It is normally clear in the context anyway so
(surprisingly) doesn't even lead to any confusion. They do have 'measure
words' which can be used in a similar sort of function to a/an, but they are a
bit more abstract.

------
eitally
Hehe, pick your poison:
[http://aschmann.net/AmEng/](http://aschmann.net/AmEng/) (This ties in with
bane's much more detailed note below about adopting the "customer's style of
speech." I do the same, and have a lot of experience in business & social
contexts with Brazilians, Mexicans, Indians, Scots, and Chinese via my global
organization, and it still boggles my mind how rare it seems to be for people
to switch communication styles based on the skills and language/idiom of the
person they're speaking with. The flip side, of course, is that when both
sides are learning the other's language, if the conversation is attempted in
both simultaneously a disaster almost always occurs. Tying in to another of
bane's comments, if you are expecting to hear one thing but something else
hits your ears, you're going to have a much tougher time comprehending it.

------
JacobSkyler
I think belonging to a church probably helps a lot too, just because I know
quite a few Christians from foreign countries and all of them have pretty mild
accents. Even the ones who've only been speaking English for a few years.

Language immersion would be the obvious factor there but I have a hunch that
group singing plays a big role too.

------
psidebot
One excellent tool for accent reduction used by linguists but often neglected
in language education is IPA (international phonetic alphabet).

You can learn the portion of IPA relevant to the language you're working on,
as well has how each symbol translates to mouth movements.

Then you can use the IPA transcriptions available in some dictionaries to not
only hear how the word sounds when pronounced by a native speaker, but also
know what they are doing mechanically to produce those sounds.

This is especially helpful, because it can train you to identify and produce
the different phonemes that your brain isn't attuned to for in your native
language (one classic example is japanese speakers' difficulty with r and l,
which happens because different languages make different decisions about what
constitutes a unique sound).

------
raverbashing
Here's the way I learn new accents. Bear with me.

I have a hard time learning from people with the accent. Rather, it's easier
for me to learn from people who _imitates_ it. Weird.

I know what the American accent (let's say, the 'regular' one, not the
Southern one) sounds like. I couldn't talk like that (or at least, I didn't
know how close I was). British accent, easy for me, because I learned from
someone who could mimic it.

Cue that Monty Python sketch where they're speaking like Americans (it's the
Philosophy dinner, I think). Bam, clicked right in.

Charlize Theron mentioned in an "Inside the Actor's Studio" that she solved
her accent by "overdoing" the accent she wanted to sound like

~~~
LeeHunter
If the Monty Python sketch you're thinking of is the one where everyone is
called 'Bruce' the accent is Australian, not American.

~~~
raverbashing
This one:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkp7f8IxJNU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkp7f8IxJNU)

------
honzzz
Interesting thing about accents is that while you are trying to improve your
accent you also improve your ability to understand the accents of others. I am
native Czech speaker and I have a friend who is from UK and who tries to learn
and speak Czech. None of our Czech friends understands what he is saying - I
seem to be the only one who is able to handle his really strong accent. I am
explaining this by the theory that living in foreign countries and trying to
hear the differences between the way native speakers pronounce something and
my pronunciation trained my ear to pick the content out of the noise.

------
paveldolezal
Going twice through this book and following every instruction, I achieved the
best improvement of my accent in very short time:
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1438071655/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1438071655/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1438071655&linkCode=as2&tag=paveldolezal-20)

I always recommend it to anyone who admires my ‘American’ accent. There are
just few simple rules that everyone can learn and familiarize. Accent is a
skill.

------
dodo53
I wonder if there's a way you could help this with software. I remember
reading a long time ago about singing pitch training by realtime headphone
feedback (like - if you're singing flat, you are feed back your voice
distorted even more flat[1]). I wonder if you could detect and exaggerate
differences in prononciation.

[1] - closest I could google now was
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8173617](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8173617)
which makes it look pretty ineffective actually :o/

~~~
mietek
Wouldn't visual feedback be easier to comprehend?

------
codygman
It is a sad state of affairs that reducing your accent can increase your
chances of success, though I guess everyone has a bias towards hiring people
like them.

I wish that hiring was done without being able to hear the voice, see the
face, or any other details that would identify race, religion, or culture of a
prospective hire.

I think that would do a good job of eliminating bias, however the bias would
still exist for things like promotions.

------
goodcharacters
I've just read this: Sarah Colwill Speaks Out About Foreign Accent Syndrome In
BBC Documentary 'The Woman Who Woke Up Chinese'
([http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/04/sarah-colwill-
_n_38...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/04/sarah-colwill-
_n_3869077.html))

This is the first time I heard “Foreign Accent Syndrome.” Very interesting.

------
tpsc
My knowledge of English is based on 24 series of "The Simpsons" so I
definitely agree with the point about watching TV.

~~~
wolframarnold
Before I came to the U.S. in the mid 1990's I geeked out on two grocery bags'
worth of VHS tapes of StarTrek Next Generation. Nothing like learning English
from the forever affable Captain Picard or the eternally proper Data. I found
it very helpful then.

The other piece of advice I have which I didn't see mentioned is to date a
local, or several. They care about you and will help you learn. They'll also
teach you idiomatic and colloquial language and correct you if you get it
wrong.

Lastly: talk to young children ages four through eight or so. Unless they grow
up multi-lingually, they don't have a concept of people speaking different
languages and will just assume you'll understand and will be able to reply
intelligently. They also don't have much experience with accents. For them
it's more of a binary thing either they'll get you or they won't, they have no
judgment nor enough experience to adapt to you. When learning French that was
always my own personal test of how intelligible my speaking was in the foreign
language.

------
paulnechifor
If you struggle so hard to imitate an authentic native English speaker accent
doesn't that have the side effect of ruining your accent in your native
accent?

For example I changed to a Dvorak-like layout, and could barely type QWERTY.
(I changed back to QWERTY because it's just too ingrained into everything.)

~~~
liranz
From my experience - it does not. Sometimes people ask me whether I'm
foreigner speaking Hebrew, but it rarely happens, and I think it is more
related to the pace of how I speak now and less with the accent.

------
pawelwentpawel
The best thing I ever did for my accent was doing some simple low paid part-
time jobs in restaurants and night clubs in UK. As a foreign bartender, waiter
or a bouncer you are forced to speak and most importantly to be confident in a
foreign language.

------
andrewcooke
the wife of a (chilean) friend of mine is a speech therapist. the discussions
here prompted me to contact her - she thinks she could help my spanish and i'm
considering going to some sessions.

if anyone else in santiago wants an introduction / contact email me (to be
honest, she may be doing it as a favour to me, as i think she works more with
children, but she will have other contacts, and here it's generally better to
find people through recommendations than cold calling...)

------
zerr
Any resources to help master that lovely British pronunciation?

~~~
adamauckland
Which lovely British pronounciation? You mean like the Queen speaks?

There is so much regional difference between Cornish, Devon, Essex, Newport,
Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool or Edinburgh I don't see how it's possible to
speak English without some accent.

~~~
lostlogin
There are more accents within the UK that have less in common with each other
than most other English language speaking countries combined. At least it
feels that way when you work in a few pubs there...

~~~
arethuza
A lot of the regions of the UK have pretty strong dialects of English, not
just accents e.g. the Doric Scots of my birth uses "fa", "fit", "faur" and
"fan" for "who", "what", "where" and "when"

e.g. "far div ye bide" -> "where do you live"

However, I haven't spoken like that much since I was a wee loonie.

------
eriksank
Unfortunately, the mastery of a language has not particularly much to do with
using grammatically-correct language constructs, or even a correct accent. In
that respect, language is a bit like music, and mastery is much more the
ability to use grace notes,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_note](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_note),
than the ability to just follow the rules. "How much can I be off, and break
the rules, before I am off too much?" You will find that excellent native
speakers are systematically off all the time. This can become a problem for
non-native speakers when the real message is hidden in the grace notes. Other
native speakers will immediately get the point ...

