Your Accent Isn't Why People Can't Understand You

Have you ever apologised for your accent when speaking English?

Many English learners assume that if someone doesn't understand them, their accent must be the problem. But what if that's not actually true?

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In this episode of the Hey Lady! Confident English Podcast, Emma answers a question from Lan in Vietnam and explores the difference between accent and pronunciation.

You'll discover why having an accent is completely normal, what research tells us about being understood in English, and the practical steps you can take to improve your pronunciation and speak more clearly.

If you've ever felt embarrassed about your accent or worried that people can't understand you, this episode is for you.

Links mentioned in this episode:

👩🏼‍🏫 Research paper by linguists Munro & Derwing

👄 Check out Emma's Imitation Lessons on YouTube

💬 About Emma

Emma is the founder of Hey Lady! and creator of the YouTube channel mmmEnglish, trusted by more than 6 million English learners worldwide.

Hey Lady! is a global English-speaking community for women who want to build confidence through real conversations, connection and consistent practice.

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💬 Have a question or challenge you'd like Emma to talk about in a future episode?

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Transcript

0:00

You're speaking to someone in English. The words are coming. You're feeling really good. But then you see it. It's that look, that slight frown, and then, " Sorry, but I'm not following you." Your heart sinks. Your brain does what it always does in that moment. It goes straight to the same thought, " They noticed. They noticed that I sound different. It's my accent. They can't understand me because of how I speak English." Hey, welcome back, and a big welcome to anyone who's joining us for the very first time. This is the Confident English Podcast. I'm your host, Emma, the founder of Hey Lady!, an online community that brings women together from all around the world to practise speaking English. Every week, right here, we break down the barriers that keep you from speaking with confidence, whether that's at work, while you're travelling, or in everyday life. If you've been learning English for a long time and you're still struggling to speak up, then you are in exactly the right place. I'm really glad that you're here and that we've got time to dive into this episode together. Now, a fabulous question from Lan inspired today's episode. She writes to me from Vietnam. She says, " Emma, I met you when you were my teacher in Ho Chi Minh City many years ago. I watched all your YouTube videos since then. My city has many tourists. I try and speak with them for practising my English. But they don't understand me. I always say,"Sorry for my accent". And I feel so discouraged, like shame. How can I fix my accent?" Lan, thank you so much for writing and sharing this. I know that after spending so much time studying and memorising English, it's a horrible feeling when people don't understand you when you speak. And to you, it's your accent. That's the most obvious explanation, the most obvious problem. And you're right, those tourists, they're unable to understand you fully because the sounds that you're making as you speak English are not obvious or recognisable to them, and that's where the communication breaks down. But I want to share a slightly different take on this today, a different way of understanding what is actually happening in that moment. Because Lan, I don't think that your accent is the problem here. And by the end of this episode, I hope that I can show you why. Let's start with something that sounds simple, but it matters much more than you might think. Everyone has an accent. Every single person who speaks English has one. I have one. You have one. A woman from London sounds different to a woman from Texas or Singapore or Nigeria, and they all speak English, and they all sound different. And your accent is what tells people your story, where you're from, your country, your community, and probably the teachers who helped to shape the way that you first learned to speak You have an accent in your first language and you have an accent in English. It is all part of who you are. But the question is, is your accent the reason why people find it difficult to understand you? Two linguistic professors asked this exact question, and for anyone who's interested, I've linked Munro and Derwing's research down in the show notes. But they found that even heavily accented speech can still be understood, and the reason for that is because listeners typically adjust within about 60 seconds of time speaking with someone. So Lan, if you are holding that conversation for longer than 60 seconds, those tourists should be able to adjust and adapt to the way that you sound. So the truth is, a strong accent is not the reason that you are being misunderstood. You can have a noticeable accent, and you can still communicate your message clearly and accurately. So if your accent is not the problem, then what is? Almost always it's pronunciation and your delivery. Accent and pronunciation, they are not the same thing, but they are connected. The sounds of your first language shapes the way that you deliver English, and that is completely normal and natural. English uses sounds that just don't exist in some languages or sound combinations that don't frequently occur together, and so they're unfamiliar. They don't come naturally or easily, and therefore our brains are wired to default to sounds that are more familiar, more recognisable, the sounds from our first language. And this becomes part of what we hear as an accent. Pronunciation is what helps us to speak clearly. When we speak clearly, we can be easily understood even with an accent. Pronunciation is not only about producing individual sounds in English, it's also about how you deliver those sounds, the rhythm, the pace, the stress. And I want to give you an example. English is a stressed timed language, so certain words in every sentence carry more weight than others. The important words, words like nouns and verbs, the ones that carry the meaning, they get stressed, and the smaller connecting words, they often soften or reduce down.

Listen to this sentence: 7:19

We're going to the concert tonight. So in that sentence, going, concert, tonight, these are all the stressed words, the words that clearly give us meaning, and the functional grammatical words between, they drop down, they reduce, and they are often unstressed. Now, many other languages don't work this way. Vietnamese, for example, is a syllable timed language, so each syllable is given roughly equal weight in a sentence. So that same sentence spoken with roughly the same amount of stress on each syllable will sound completely different. It will sound like, "We are going to the concert tonight." Hear the difference? Now, for an English speaker, it's not impossible to understand this, but as a listener, you do need to work harder to try and identify the words and the meaning. The familiar stress pattern of English is missing from that sentence, so a native speaker might need to ask you to repeat what you said one more time before they understand. But if you learn to follow the patterns of spoken English, then you will absolutely be understood even with your accent. And the good news is that learning the sounds and the patterns of English, this is something that anyone can do, and it's much less complicated than trying to change your accent. There is something that you can start practising today, right now, by yourself, that will make a real difference to how clearly you speak, and it's called shadowing. If you've been learning with me, you've been watching my YouTube videos for a while, you'll recognise this. My imitation technique is built on this exact idea, and I'll link some examples of the imitation technique down in the show notes so that you can try it yourself if you haven't seen them before. Basically, you need to find an English speaker whose pace and energy feels right to you, someone that you like to listen to. Now, it could be this podcast, or maybe a YouTube channel that you regularly watch. Ideally, it's somewhere where you can see the captions or the transcript. And instead of just watching the video, you speak along with the speaker. So you listen to a sentence, you pause, and you repeat it again after them. And then after you've done it a few times, you can switch to shadowing, and you speak while they speak, so you follow their rhythm. You copy how they stress certain words and how they let others go quiet. You can even copy their facial expressions and their gestures, the physical shape that they make as they deliver English. You're not just trying to sound more like them, you're trying to feel what it's like to speak with that rhythm and to feel that from the inside Shadowing is great because it trains your ears, it trains your muscle memory, and your pronunciation skills all at the same time. So it is a deeply useful practise. It's something that you can do on your own at any time and as often as you can. Practising your pronunciation on your own will definitely take you a long way, but at some point you need to bring what you've been practising into real conversations with real people, because that's where you get to test it, right? You get real time feedback, and you get to find out if what you've been practising is actually having an impact. Now, I know that this thought can be really intimidating. You're imagining yourself speaking with fast-talking native speakers, right? The good news is you don't have to start there. You can, and you will improve your pronunciation by speaking with a wide range of English accents. Something that I always hear students say is, "Oh, I can only speak with native speakers. If I speak with other English learners, I'll just learn to make their mistakes, too." This is simply not true. Well, there's two exceptions to this. If you speak with only one person in English for years and years, then yes, you will likely pick up elements of their accent as well, but it takes years. The other exception is you want to try and avoid always speaking with other English speakers who have the same pronunciation challenges as you do, because you can easily understand each other even though others might not. But when you speak regularly with people who have lots of different accents, you will learn to adapt and adjust your English accent so that you can be more easily understood by more people. You get to find out what words you're not saying clearly, what words you have to repeat again until you are understood. In learning where you're not being clear, you're prompted to make adjustments and corrections until you are, and this can happen really naturally in real live conversations. And so as much as it's uncomfortable when someone doesn't understand you, it is the clearest signal that you have that there is a part of your pronunciation that you need to adjust or to work on. So will your accent completely change just by speaking more English? Well, in a way, yes, but it really does depend on how much you speak and who you speak to. In the same way that accents are shaped by the language that you grew up with, accents can be influenced by the people that you're surrounded by. When you spend a lot of time speaking with people who sound different from you, then you start to adjust almost naturally with time. Heavy accents tend to soften quite a bit because the speaker needs to adjust how they sound in order to be understood by the people that they're spending time with. And your accent will soften too. If you spend more time talking to different people with different accents, then you will learn how to adjust the way that you speak so that others can understand you clearly as well. So Lan, don't convince yourself that you need to fix or you need to lose your accent and get a new one. But you can improve aspects of your pronunciation that will make it much easier for other people to understand you as you speak English. Any member of our community knows that Hey Lady! is a great place to gain experience meeting and talking to people with different accents. When you experience many different English accents, Italian, Brazilian, Korean, Vietnamese, you start hearing what actually makes English clear across all of them, the stress, the emphasis, the clarity of sounds. And learning to recognise the differences between accents is a genuinely useful skill. Because when you think about it, four out of five people who speak English in the world today, they're not native speakers. So when you can hear their accents then your ability to understand the accents of native speakers also improves. You build that flexibility into your listening skills as well. So if more speaking practice is what you're looking for, then I'm inviting you to come and give Hey Lady! a try. The link is down in the description to start a free seven-day trial. It's down in the show notes, down in the description. And as always, I would love to hear from you. Is there a specific pronunciation challenge that is holding you back from speaking English clearly? If so, send me a message. You can write in so that I can answer your question on our podcast as well. Thank you so much for joining me today. If there is one thing that I hope you take away from this episode, it's that it's not your accent that is a problem that needs to be fixed. It is your pronunciation, and you can certainly train your ears, your muscle memory to speak clearly and to be understood. I will see you for the next episode next week!