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

Pronunciation or Intonation?
At first glance, it can seem that the differences between a native accent and
a foreign accent are all in the pronunciation, but intonation takes a much
more critical role. When I had the chance to chat with a very interesting
Italian polyglot, Luca Lampariello, this was made very clear.
Luca can speak a large number of languages and was studying to be an
interpreter when I met him, but what really struck me as the most
impressive thing about him is that he has almost no noticeable accent in
several of his learned languages. When I first heard him speak English, I
would have thought he was American, if it weren’t for his YouTube channel
being called “poliglotta80” (the Italian word for “polyglot”). Natives of
other languages, such as German and Spanish, have confirmed that he is
incredibly convincing in these languages too.
But he did not grow up speaking these languages. When I asked him
about improving pronunciation to have a more convincing accent, he made
sure the conversation quickly focused on intonation.
He considers intonation to be like the network that holds a sentence
together. The example he gave me was to notice how the word “France”
sounds different in a sentence like “France is a beautiful country” versus “I
would like to go to France.” In the first sentence, when we are not
emphasizing particular words, we tend to say the word “France” with its
intonation rising upward, but in the second sentence, our intonation tends to
go down on the word “France.”
As another example, he said, “I want to talk to Mark and John,” and if
we listen carefully, we hear that we put different tonalities on “Mark”

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(going up, indicating that the sentence hasn’t finished yet or we are giving
the first item in a list) and on “John” (the end of factual sentences in
English tend to have a downward turn).
Rather than learn these intonation rules individually, Luca
recommended that people try to see the general picture of how these rules
apply to a language. Appreciating this “network” allows you to step back,
see the whole picture, and truly appreciate how a sentence sounds and
conveys meaning beyond just its individual words.
He has his own approach for trying to appreciate this visually as well as
audibly. You can imagine certain types of sentences that serve a particular
purpose (presenting a fact, giving an order, asking a question) following