Accent Reduction

1. Listen to native speakers: Listen to native speakers of the language you are trying to reduce your accent in and pay attention to their pronunciation and how they form their words. 2. Record yourself: Record yourself speaking in the language and then play it back so you can hear…

One easy way to increase your worth by 50% is to hone your communication skills — both written and verbal — Warren Buffett — Everyone agrees that communication is important, however, many of them didn’t figure out how. I’m by no means a good communicator but I’m committed to becoming one. In the past two months, I’ve had the privilege of working with coaches to accomplish my three goals of: accent reduction, storytelling and…

People frequently ask me how I get to speak English with ease and so little accent. It’s not always been the case. Also I’m told that I sound like I grew up in the US, or like I’ve been in Canada for many years. Neither is true, by the way…

Over the course of 6 weeks I’ve been working with a speech and communication coach, Peter, on my English accent and my communication abilities. Why did I do it? Was it worthwhile? Did anything change? What worked / what didn’t? What’s next for me? Why did I do it? For the past 15+ years I’ve…

This article was originally posted on my website’s blog I recently surpassed 2000 classes taught on italki. This was an exciting milestone for me and one that made me reflect on a few things: how I got here, how I’m doing, and how I want to take things further. How I got here It…

I teach accent reduction, helping students of English to reduce their foreign accent and speak more like a native English speaker. Students often find it overwhelming to go from learning to correctly pronounce a target sound in class to consistently producing it in daily life. In this article, I outline…

Accents are tricky things. When we start to learn a language, we need to decide which accents we want to follow. For example, Spanish from Spain or Latin America? French from France or Canada? There are no good or bad accents in the world. The perception of accents largely depends…

Most infants begin to learn a language since they are born. Although they may not be able to make a sound within the first 6 months, they are absorbing the language from adults around them, sounds, gestures and expressions so they can match sounds with images when they get older. …