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Free accent reduction methods?

  Tags: Accent
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
43 messages over 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
Teango
Triglot
Winner TAC 2010 & 2012
Senior Member
United States
teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5316 days ago

2210 posts - 3734 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Russian
Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona

 
 Message 41 of 43
07 May 2015 at 11:40pm | IP Logged 
I'd recommend focusing on one salient issue at a time. A native speaker or tutor can probably best advise you on what issues need the most work, although this is of course up to you and what feels most important to you right now.

I'd break any work on accent reduction/addition down into 3 categories, and focus particularly on prosody before and over anything else:

i. exercises you can do by listening, repeating, and analyzing select native samples on your own,

(with some knowledge of the IPA, how sounds in your L1 and other languages you know compare/contrast with sounds in the L2 youʻre learning, and a good visual/kinaesthetic idea of how your mouth articulates these sounds),

ii. exercises that require you to additionally record yourself and contrast this with native samples,

(As Olle Kjellin points out, we form perceptual models of what we listen to through our body, e.g., bone conduction. This is often very different to what others hear. For example, I usually dread to hear my own voice in a recording, and exclaim: hey, that's not me! By recording yourself, you can hear your accent from other people's perspective and refine or develop it further.)

iii. exercises that require the help and "ear" of a native speaker or tutor,

(i.e., there's only so much you can perceive on your own as a non-native speaker, whereas a native speaker has a much richer and more well-developed phonemic inventory, with all the possible variations, of the sounds in their own L1.)

Olle Kjellin introduces lots of interesting ideas in his articles to help with accent addition/reduction, including extensive listening before production, developing variance in categorical perception, using exaggeration and whole body movement as part of encoding, and capitalizing on the rhythmic nature of memory and attention. It's particularly interesting to note that prosodic acquisition is more or less complete before a baby even starts talking! For more details, his 1999 article "Accent Addition: Prosody and Perception Facilitate Second Language Learning" offers a nice summary of key theories and practices in the field.


Edited by Teango on 08 May 2015 at 12:28am

4 persons have voted this message useful



1e4e6
Octoglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4050 days ago

1013 posts - 1588 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian
Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan

 
 Message 42 of 43
08 May 2015 at 12:00am | IP Logged 
A free way that I have used for years, without help of anyone, and I realise that it
has its limits because there is only so much that one can do. But if you cannot speak
with natives just to get the mouth muscles in their proper positions with more
practise, what I do is to talk to myself. Obviously, only when home alone, or if at
home and everyone else in the home does not mind. The idea is just to get the muscles
in the right places as if one were conversing with other people.

But if there are no other people, just speaking aloud to oneself helps quite a lot to
self-fix pronunciation mistakes. Even if your pronunciation does not sound off,
sometimes this is only achieved with moving the mouth in awkward ways. Speaking to
oneself would help in making it less so, and sounding correct with mouth muscles in
the right places. But this would have to be done with extensive listening to help with
mimicking what is heard.
1 person has voted this message useful



phonology
Groupie
Peru
Joined 3472 days ago

40 posts - 48 votes
Speaks: Spanish*

 
 Message 43 of 43
14 July 2015 at 6:18am | IP Logged 
a native speech therapist who speaks slowly and correct errors of intonation would help
reduce native accent.


1 person has voted this message useful



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