Transcript
So accent reduction. Accent reduction is less about reducing your accent and more about learning a new one.
So if your goal is to learn a general American accent the first thing you do is you train your muscles. You train the muscles of your lips, your tongue, your jaw to take on a wide variety of different accents.
Your muscles are perfectly suited to speak your native dialect or your native tongue. But to speak a general American you want to train the muscles to speak American English effectively.
The next thing you want to do is you want to train your ear. How do Americans express themselves? What’s the musicality of the voice? Do they use volume or pitch to express themselves? So these are things that you want to look for when you’re training your ear.
The next thing you want to do is you want to train your eyes. You want to watch native speakers expressing themselves. You want to watch their mouths, their jaw, how much their mouths and jaw move. And it’s really helpful when you’re doing this kind of training to have a mirror next to you.
So you can watch a native speaker, say you go on the Internet and you look at a clip, a video clip of a native speaker speaking, and then you try to emulate them through some mimicry. You can look in the mirror, refer to your mirror, and make sure that your muscles are emulating the movement of theirs.
The last thing you want to remember is that there are as many accents as there are people. So when you’re choosing conscious mimicry you want to choose someone that you want to sound like.
So that’s my two cents on accent reduction.
