Why is Accent Reduction Difficult? | #054

Today's episode considers 4 components of your speech development which made learning an accent particularly difficult. We also consider just HOW you might get started at overcoming these difficulties, and retraining your speech. 

Listen on in for some great tips!

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Speaker 1 0:41

Welcome to the English out loud podcast. The podcast where I give you tips on how you can enhance your spoken English. My name is Pat and , uh, playing around with my phone here a little bit, because I am going to be making Instagram reels . I'm going to be taking bits from this here, putting them on Instagram for everyone to hear and listen to later. So I hope you enjoy. Wow . That means give me a follow on Instagram. That's what I'm saying there. E N dot out loud. Give me a follow. If you already followed me. Thank you. And you can expect to see these reels up , uh , and enjoy them. Enjoy them because I mean, I want to , you know, not everybody wants to live

Speaker 2 1:29

Into a full 15 or 20 minutes and Hey, if I can

Speaker 1 1:32

Put on a quick little 32nd , uh, you know, tip, why not do that today?

Speaker 2 1:39

I want to get into a couple of misconceptions when it comes to learning an accent, you see, there are some ideas that people have when it comes to learning an accent that , um, I think are really worth addressing because, because there are difficulties that we face and it's imperative to your English, that you don't let these difficulties get in the way of pushing yourself to learn more. You know, we want to get past these difficulties. We got to move beyond

Speaker 1 2:11

Those things. Well,

Speaker 2 2:13

I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the difficulties of learning and accent. Some of the common beliefs that people have when it comes to an accent. And , uh , and the fact is, honestly, if we can identify what's tough about this, then maybe we can even overcome it too . Right now, there are two common beliefs that I find when it comes to learning an accent. And it's either that people think an accent is essential to their speech and they can't continue learning English without it or else other people believe that it's impossible to achieve a clear accent. And so why bother doing it in the first place? Well, in my opinion, neither of these are completely accurate. When we consider some factors in our own lives, maybe we can see that achieving a 100% American sounding accent may be out of the reach of some people, but when you come to understand why it may still motivate you to see exactly what you can do about it, you see, first of all, age is the first thing that we want to consider is how old you are. From what I've seen in my experience, working with students, kids pick this stuff up in no time, particularly under the age of 13 is what I see when I'm working with kids eight years old, nine years old, accent stuff. I show it to them. They listen, they repeat it to me and they don't forget it. I've had kids tell me they would go to school after our class. And they thought that now their friends sounded funny because now they could understand how English would sound for English speakers. And they thought that their friends around here didn't quite get that same sound. So kids have this incredible ability to learn an accent. No time they do it. Naturally their brains are absorbing information and they're just repeating what they hear adults on the other hand, tend to lose this ability. Why does this happen? Well, when we're kids, our brains are constantly identifying and learning new sounds in whatever your first language may be or languages. And as we do this, our muscles develop to move more quickly and efficiently in making these sounds. And so our ability to speak and learn it flourishes, it just gets better and better. Now, the older that we get our brains move on to other developments of our body. We've got muscles to develop. We've got bones to grow. We've got a lot of other things. You know, that , that our body needs to develop than just our brain. So after about the age of 13, you know, puberty age, your brain stops working on language and it starts working on other things, learning a language. It gets tougher after this. And then between 14 and 25, it again gets even tougher. Still. You can still do it because your brain is still developing, but it gets tougher to remember and retain the information. And after 25, you got to work extra hard. You can learn a new language after 25. If , if you listened to my interview with Francisco Martinez , she started learning English in her thirties. Well, now a few years later, she's speaking English just fine. She speaks, she had a whole interview with me in English. That goes to show, you can learn after you're 25, just takes more work. So what can we do about it? Your age may make this a little bit more difficult, but that doesn't make changing your muscle memory impossible. When it comes to your accent, learning your muscle memory as a child was effortless, it was just a developmental process of your body. It was natural. However, if you choose, you can force your muscles into new positions. This is what we practiced in the previous episode with that are , are kind of pronunciation. And you can make new associations between your brain and your muscles and English words and the memory and all these things. They connect wonderfully. This isn't something that's going to develop naturally. You can't just listen anymore when you were kid. Yeah. You literally could have just listened to me and picked up an American accent just from listening and trying what I said today. That's not going to happen so easily today. It's going to take a little more time. So you need to make it happen. It won't just happen on its own. And you can with muscle memory exercises, you know, what are those? Well, as I mentioned before, the movie Rocky talked about this in my previous episode, in that movie, Rocky he's shadow boxing. He's always punching the air punch in the or shadow boxing. Well, when he's doing that, he's improving his muscle memory. Every time that a boxer throws a punch, it's going to be stronger. It's going to be faster than the one before it and more powerful. And then that's what Rocky is always working on is , is his shadow boxing. So that he's got no problem getting the job done. That's what we're doing here. That's what I teach. That's what a lot of these episodes are about. And the great thing is right. They're free. Look back at them again. Now, the next thing here that we want to consider is that of the people that you surround yourself with, you see, in my experience, I noticed that my students who are surrounded by Americans day and night develop better American accents, and they seem to do it quicker. So surrounded by Americans, what am I talking about? Well, they're coworkers , friends, family it's could be a spouse. TV shows, social media, YouTube , uh , clubhouse. If I meant , I mentioned clubhouse in a previous episode and I'm on their teaching stuff and there's hundreds, thousands of people on there teaching stuff, clubhouse. I actually started a club on clubhouse so that you could go there and practice it's called American accent learners. So all of these play a major factor in your accent development. Now speaking for myself, half in Toronto, most of the , my friends are Hispanic people. They come from Venezuela. They come from Peru. They come from Mexico. They come from Ecuador, all over Latin America. I learned Spanish listening to these people speak and just repeating what I heard them say. This helped me develop an accent that goes beyond the typical Canadian American sounding accent. It , uh , I could really get into the culture this way. And then I've gone from people saying, Oh, you're you speak a little Spanish. Good for you. Now, when people meet me in Canada, they say, Oh, where are you from? It surprises people. And that's something I've learned from hanging out with Latina . He knows. So what does this go to say? It goes to say that that you are capable of doing it as well, surround yourself with these influences. Now I understand these days. It's not. So to get out and meet American friends. But like I said, this app clubhouse , um, other apps online, there's a website. Bleach is a great one to use. You can check out things and surround yourself with influences of the culture that you want. And then it's really going to help. Well , that's all I can say there. It's really going to help. It'll set you on the right track and you'll adapt as well to the culture, much easier. So far. We've got your age is , uh , something that, you know, makes it a little bit difficult when learning an accent. We've got the things that you surround yourself with. If you're surrounded by, you know, your own culture, then how are you going to adapt to a brand new one? If you're only surrounded by your own culture, you got to put some new things in there. So if an accent is what you want, then Hey, dive in with both feet. The next thing we want to consider is your personality because we've got different personalities. You know, myself, I'm comfortable meeting new people. I'm comfortable , uh, practicing a new language, practicing a new skill. Even if I sound silly, even if I think I sound like a baby, I'm comfortable doing it. So you can do the exact same and you should be doing the exact same when it comes to your English, push yourself. If you want to develop an accent. But like I said, your personality may not be that kind of person, your personality determines whether you will or will not take those risks that are necessary in developing an accent. If you have an outgoing attitude, you are somebody who can just get out, talk to people. And if you're willing to try new things, even at the risk of looking a little silly, you will see changes in your , uh, in your speech. You will see changes in your confidence, in that speech as well. Now that's easier said than done. You know, I know how that is. I know how frustrating it is from experience. When I'm positive that I'm saying a word correctly, and somebody is telling me [inaudible] Oh my God, I'm saying it correctly. And they're telling me, I don't understand you. I, Oh, I can't stand it. I've been there many times, but I'm telling you, if you push on through, if you persevere and you keep practicing, you will see significant changes in those components of your speech. But there are a lot of people throughout the world are not comfortable exposing themselves in such a way to strangers. It just feels not good to them. It's actually, it's a pretty normal difficulty. I mean, who really does want to do that? This is where technology comes in handy. As I mentioned in the previous tip, you've got your phone. You're listening to me right now, which is a major step. So of course you're comfortable using a little bit of technology, but take it up a notch. Is your phone in English? Is your GPS in English when you're driving from point a to point B, are you getting confused with the directions? Because they're in a different language. If your GPS isn't in English, if , if this podcast doesn't make you late for work, at least once because your GPS is in English, then I don't know what you're doing with , uh , with these tips I'm giving you. And I know you're not applying them because you should not have arrived to work on time every day. If your GPS was in your own language, you should be changing that to English. And you'll be a little late at first. And that's how you're going to learn. That's how you're going to step it up a notch because you'll say, Oh, okay. I ran late right there. Uh, my GPS was in English. I better look up these words cause I don't want to be late next time. Right? So GPS in English use the technology around you, push yourself to listen and understanding it definitely GPS in English. Do it, do it another great website as well. You glish.com you glitch.com , anew glitch.com. You get on there. You can type in any phrase that you hear Americans using. You put it in and you can hear people repeat that phrase dozens of times, if you like, you'd hear it again. And again, and again, it's a great website. And that is how you remember that shadow boxing idea. That's how that's done is well , just repeating what you're seeing people say. So you need to practice these movements. If you don't want to get out and talk to people that doesn't mean it's impossible to see improvement, but it just means you're going to have to dedicate a little more time of your day to studying, to listening, to taking notes, to rehearsing things. That's all that means. There's another thing that you want to consider here. This is the filter of your native language. When you hear something, as I mentioned for the first 13 years of your life, your brain was training itself to learn a certain way of speaking. It was absorbing all this linguistic information and then it spent another 12 years solidifying what it learned, you know, saying, okay, this is, this is how people talk. This is language and putting a filter on your ears so that everything that you would hear would be, you know, pass through that filter so that you could understand it. Well, here's the trouble with that. Some sounds that exist in English don't exist in many other languages. The T H sound, for example, like that is not widely used in the world outside of English. It is yeah . Used in some places, but the movement is very uncommon. You know, outside of the English speaking world, other combinations made in English may not exist in your other language either. And vice versa, you know , sounds that you have in your native language, don't exist in English. And then not to mention stress, something that I'm always talking about in these podcasts, you know, the stress of the T sound, syllable, stress, all these things, the stress of English is up, down, up down. I asked a Japanese buddy of mine a few years ago who , uh , he was an English learner and I asked him, how do I sound? You know, as like a North American speaker, how do I sound when I speak to you? And he said, you sound like, Whoa . And it was that his fault that I sound like a caveman, heck no, it wasn't his fault. The filter on him , his ears for understanding language. It, it came through sounding like that because in his language, the way he speaks, it sounds choppy. It sounds as though he's very serious all of the time when he would speak English, but that's because of the filter I'm hearing. Whereas he may just be making a joke. And to me it would sound serious, right? So, so those are the things that we want to be considering when it comes to language, learning the filter of your own language, you want to consider your own personality. You know, are you someone who can dive into this? Are you someone who can just, when you learn something new, are you going to try it? It's okay. If not, but it's going to be quicker and a little easier if , uh, if you can , uh, who do you, you surround yourself with? You know, what friends do you have or maybe family members, maybe music, maybe TV shows. What do you surround yourself with that helps, you know , understand that culture more. And finally, how old are you? Are you okay ? Over the age of 25? If so, you're not out of luck. It's just going to take a little more work, but that's what people hire me for. So I'll keep on being around here to help you do that job. Well, I've got to get to wrap in this one up for today. So let's consider though that question posed at the beginning, is it worth putting time into learning a new accent? Are you capable of it? I say you are. I say you , but you need to set some realistic goals for yourself. You can't undo your original

Speaker 1 18:27

Way of speaking, or at least you don't want it undo your original way of speaking because that's part of who you are and the older that you are, the more difficult it gets. But if you consider the four factors that what I spoke about here today, and you take some time to work on these, then you will see results. You will see results. It's just going to take a matter of dedication. We're going to wrap this one up for today. I truly hope that you've enjoyed these accent tips. Um, I hope that you have a wonderful day. I hope that you , uh, you enjoy yourself as you go about your regular activities. Thank you for listening today. Thank you for taking a little bit of time to take your speech. Seriously. I'm always happy to have such dedicated listeners listening on it and uh, well, keep up the good work. Have a good one.