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Accent Reduction Class

Hi. I’m from Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa.com. Let’s talk about reducing your accent. Are you tired of repeating yourself? Do people often ask, “What’d you say? What was that?” It’s a really great thing to speak clearly and be understandable. So in this lesson, I’m going to help give you some tools to help reduce your accent so that you can be more understandable in conversational English. Notice that I said reduce your accent. The goal is not to get rid of your accent 100%. You’ll always have a slight accent from your native language, but don’t be ashamed of that when you speak English and someone asks, “Where are you from?” This is a great way to talk about your home country, to educate other people about the world, to break stereotypes, and, honestly, to make the world a better place. When you meet a nice person from another country, it can change and shape your whole perspective about that place. For example, about 10 years ago, I spent a couple days in Poland. And on the way to Poland, I met a student on the train, and he was so nice. Talked to me, and talked to my friends, and decided to cancel all of his classes the next day, and be our personal tour guide. He showed us all around the city. And now, to this day, 10 years later, I have such a wonderful, warm feeling when I think about Poland, because this one guy shaped my view of Poland. I say all of this because I don’t want you to hide where you’re from. You have the opportunity to give someone that warm feeling about your country. So if they ask where you’re from, don’t be ashamed. Tell them about it. But in order to tell someone about your country, you need to be understood. So, let’s talk about three ways that you can reduce your accent so that you can be more easily understood. They are practice individual sounds, practice linking sounds, and practice word stress. If you can’t hear the correct sounds, or word stress, you’re not going to be able to use it yourself. So the key is to train your ears to hear the difference between correct sounds, and incorrect sounds, and practice it yourself. All right. Let’s break down these tips, starting with the first one. Practice individual sounds. If I asked you which sounds in English are the most challenging for you, you probably already know. Is it TH, R, L, F, P? Or maybe it’s some certain vowels? Sit, seat. But how can you improve them? You can improve them by practicing challenge sentences that use those difficult sounds. Let’s do that now. Is the TH sound difficult for you? Let’s practice. Dan thinks a daring thought on Thursday. Can you say that with me? Dan thinks a daring thought on Thursday. Do you hear the difference between D and TH? When you say this slowly, you can hear it easier. But when we say it quickly, how does it feel to you? Dan thinks a daring thought on Thursday. Dan thinks a daring thought on Thursday. Can you say that with me? Let’s speed it up a little bit. Dan thinks a daring thought on Thursday. Is your tongue flickering out of your mouth for the TH? Thinks. Thought. Thursday. And when you say, d, your tongue is at the roof of your mouth. Dan. Daring. I hope so. Let’s go back and say this full sentence together. And this is just an example to show you that if you want to practice TH, and maybe you often mix it up with a D sound. When you say TH, it sounds like a D, practice a challenge sentence like this. Let’s say it again, together. Dan thinks a daring thought on Thursday. Dan thinks a daring thought on Thursday. To continue practicing individual sounds, make sure you check out my video, How to Pronounce the 33 Most Difficult Words, up here. Number two: practice linking sounds, or reducing sounds. Linking or reducing sounds are when words come together. It’s time to go, becomes, it’s time to go. It’s time to go. The word to becomes to, and we link it with time. Time to. Time to. It’s time to go. If I just said, “Time to,” to you, you’d kind of look at me a little bit strange. If I said that to a native speaker, they’d look at me a little bit strange. But if we say it in the full sentence, it makes sense, because we’re linking words and sounds together. It’s time to go. Where did you go becomes where’d you go. Where’d you go. The words, where did, becomes a contraction, where’d. And then the word you becomes you. Where’d you go. Where’d you go. We’re reducing the sentence. This can be tricky because there’re a lot of different ways to reduce sounds in English, but, let’s practice it now. Say this sentence with me. I study every day because I want to improve. I study every day because I want to improve. Well. Is that saying every single of the sentence? No. If I say this sentence clearly, it sounds like, I study every day because I want to improve. But when we say this sentence with linking and reduced sounds like native speakers do, it sounds much quicker, and we can practice it now. I study every … Here we’re cutting out that middle vowel, and we’re simply saying every. Don’t say every. Every day. Because becomes because. We cut off the first two letters. I study every day because I want to improve. Here, the words, want to, become reduced to want to. I study every day because I want to improve. This is a perfect example of all of the many ways that we can reduce and link sounds, because there’re so many in English. It’s great to practice this. And when you learn the key linking sounds in English, you can pronounce it better. You can reduce your accent. And you can also understand other people better. Want to practice linking sounds more? Make sure to check out my video, Seven Tips to Speak Fast English, and spoiler alert, they’re all about linking or reducing sounds. So it’s a great way to practice it. Tip number three for reducing your accent is to practice word stress. This can be tricky because you probably weren’t taught word stress in school. But it’s essential for being understandable, and also, for understanding other people. In English, we don’t stress each word the same. We have stressed words, and unstressed words. Let’s take a look at this sentence. The boy is hungry. The boy is hungry. The boy is hungry. Can you tell which two words are emphasized here? You can probably tell by just looking at the sentence which ones are the most important. Boy, and hungry. But what happens to those unstressed words? The boy is hungry. They’re really fast. So make sure that we say those not with the same emphasis, but just quickly, between the other words. The boy. The boy. The boy. Is hungry. Is hungry. The boy is hungry. The boy is hungry. Let’s look at another sentence. Can you guess which words are emphasized? The boy is really hungry. The boy is really hungry. The boy is really hungry. Oh, we’ve added an extra clap here. The boy is really hungry. We’ve added the word really, and this word is also stressed. So the stress of every sentence is unique, depending on how many important words are in that sentence. Important words are often verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs. Usually those little words, the, is, a, on. Those aren’t usually the stressed words. So you can visualize the sentence, and practice that stress. A great way to practice word stress is through shadowing. Listen to a full sentence, and then repeat that sentence out loud. Maybe you want to record your voice so that you can compare your voice with the original. This is an excellent way to train your ears to hear maybe some of the problems with your word stress, compared with the original, natural word stress. Let’s do that quickly with the two sentences that we talked about. The boy is hungry. Can you say that with me? Shadow the full sentence. The boy is hungry. Go ahead. … I hope you’re saying this out loud. Let’s do it one more time. The boy is hungry. Let’s go onto the other sentence that we’ve said. The boy is really hungry. Can you say that with me? The boy is really hungry. Go ahead, it’s your turn. … When you stress that naturally, you’re going to be training your muscles, and also training your brain, to have natural sentence structure. Are you ready to shadow some more? Make sure you check out my video, How to Pronounce the Top 10 Sentences in English, so that you can shadow with me during that full sentence. That was a lot of information, right? But I challenge you to take action. Practice individual sounds. Practice linking or reducing sounds. Practice word stress. By using some of my pronunciation lessons. At the end of this video, and also in the description, I’ll put a link to the playlist of all of my pronunciation lessons. I want you to go through that. Shadow. Emphasize the right words. De-stress the other words. Make sure that you practice the individual sounds that are the most challenging for you. I have a tongue twister video that would be great for practicing those challenging individual sounds. And make sure that you practice linking and knowing which words are often linked together. It’s great to do this to reduce your accent.