A Coffee Break with Mark

You don’t need to lose your accent

Three things worth working on instead, and why there’s no such thing as a perfect accent anyway.

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Your accent isn’t a fault. It’s not a mistake. It’s information, and it tells the person you’re talking to a bit about where you’re from. And to be honest, most people find that quite charming. No one said we all had to sound like native speakers.

1

Accent and pronunciation aren’t the same thing

Pronunciation is which sound the letters actually make, and getting that wrong can leave you saying a different word altogether. Your accent is everything else you bring to those sounds. That first one is worth some work. The rest of it you can leave exactly as it is.

2

Copy the tune of the language

Think about where the stress in a sentence happens, and how your voice rises and falls. I always find that if the tune is right, people follow you even when the sounds aren’t quite perfect. And if the tune is wrong, perfect vowels won’t rescue you.

3

Hear as many voices as you can

Podcasts, videos, TV, films, whatever you can get hold of. And you don’t need to understand it all. The more voices you’ve heard, the less any single one of them can throw you.

There's a video too

The full episode walks through the whole thing over a coffee. There's a new one every week.

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