Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

Singing Your Accent Away

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Having a convincing accent is, of course, what most of us consider a crucial
factor in being confused for a native speaker. I think this only works when
combined not just with having an overall native-like appearance, but also
with what you’re saying. It’s not just how you say something but what you
say.
Even if you use grammatically perfect sentences and do so with a
pristine accent, and even if you outwardly look like a native, if you say
things that are not generally said in that country, you will stand out like a
sore thumb.
For instance, the English phrase “go to bed” is grammatically incorrect
if you consider it compared to going anywhere else, which requires an
article (go to the kitchen, go to a bathroom) or a possessive (go to my car).
Despite this, the phrase is “go to bed.” Exposure to natives and imitating
and repeating what they say will give you real phrases.
This is how I prefer to work on improving my accent: by saying several
words that are genuinely uttered by a native, learning sentence blocks, and
processing my flash cards not as individual words but as new words in
example sentences, which give them better context than learning a single
translation from English.
There are sounds we create by combining words, and we can’t get these
from learning the sounds of individual words too well. While “my” may
theoretically be pronounced to rhyme with “buy,” when said as one word or
when speaking slowly, many native English speakers alter this a bit and say
“ma” when speaking quickly (in Ireland we even go so far as to say it as
“mee”). Vowel sounds naturally get cut shorter and some consonants
disappear altogether in English.
These are not described accurately in slowly enunciated audiotapes,
which is why I tend to take a native recording, such as a podcast or a TV
show, replay a segment, and try to mimic it precisely as well as I can. For
instance, many Spanish speakers (depending on which country and region)
don’t pronounce the d in words with ado in them; when spoken quickly and
naturally, something like pescado becomes pescao. While this may not be
“proper” Spanish, it is how many people speak and should be emulated if
you are aiming to mimic the accent of a native—in much the same way “I
dunno” is often how we say “I don’t know” in English.
For some people, focusing on repeating native-recorded phrases and
attempting to reproduce them is all they need. Many language learners get

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great mileage out of sentence drilling, and they do so only with sentences
that have been genuinely uttered by natives, rather than translations of what
they might say.
For me, this can get boring, so since I am quite musical, I have found
that singing to mimic real songs in the language can be a huge help and a
good break from repeating phrases. When people sing, they also pronounce
the words naturally and quickly (depending on the song or singer).
But rather than do this alone, I have gone back to taking private lessons.
Only this time, instead of hiring a language teacher (language teachers are
typically not qualified to help with accent reduction; they focus more on
language content in terms of vocabulary, grammar, expressions, and the
like), I hire a singing or music teacher! I have also had success with voice
trainers who specialize in helping radio broadcasters sound more
professional in their native tongues. I’ve even gone to speech therapists—
once again, those who work with native speakers aiming to improve their
pronunciation. The thing about a singing teacher, a voice trainer, and a
speech therapist is that, unlike language teachers, they are very familiar
with enunciation, pauses, mouth and tongue positions, rhythm, tonality, and
much more.
When I tried to get by as a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker, my
Carioca music teacher helped me with singing lyrics to popular Brazilian
songs after we read them aloud first. One of her criticisms of my early
attempts was that we English speakers . . . tend . . . to separate . . . our
words . . . too much . . . as we . . . speak. In Portuguese, words flow together
while your intonation goes up and down, and this helps you separate words
in your mind better than strict pauses. After I was able to repeat the phrases
she gave me to her satisfaction, hearing other foreigners speaking
Portuguese and not doing it made me immediately think that they sounded
like robots with their individual word separations, in comparison to how
Portuguese should be spoken.
My music teacher helped me appreciate this and other “musicality”
aspects of Portuguese that are applicable even, and especially, when spoken.
Singing it helped emphasize the differences even more. It was very hard to
push myself to try to sing like a native, and I wasn’t completely successful,
but in aiming toward something as hard as that, I pushed my spoken
abilities up several notches and had much more convincing Portuguese
pronunciation because of it.

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There are even accent trainers who specifically help second-language
learners. I like how Idahosa (Mimicmethod.com) does it by taking
recordings of his students. He then plays them back to the students,
highlighting the particular sounds that betray them as foreigners, and plays
them beside the native examples for comparison. If you have a native friend
online who you think can help you with precisely recorded phrases, you can
practice consistently, then upload it to SoundCloud.com (an audio
equivalent of YouTube), and comments can be made at the precise point in
the audio where your pronunciation requires a change.