I'd love to hear some tips on how to work on improving my accent. I moved to Sweden 10 years ago and Swedish is my 4th language.
1) Focus on the vowels. They will help you get the resonance right (the resonance is how you hold the muscles in your mouth, so the sound seems to come from the back of your throat like in Russian or the front of your mouth like in Korean)
2) Focus on the rhythm of the language. I'm sure you know what I mean here.
3) Focus on the intonation: what pitches do they have? Scottish has kind of a lilt, for example.
4) Try to notice "phonemes", and I put it in quotes to expand the idea to mean "what native speakers consider important". For example, Mandarin speakers can't hear a vowel change to save their life, but if you get the intonation slightly wrong they glare at you.
5) Focus on details, listen to how letters change when they are between other letters, etc. (Watching to how people respond to your speech can be helpful, especially if they don't understand. Small words especially. For example, a listener might get confused and not understand the world "Lip", even though they would understand "Literally", if your "L" is slightly off)
6) Don't underestimate the value of correct grammar in improving your accent.
Incidentally, I learned of the existence of this as formal theory from David Stern (although his focus is on stage accents which is a little different)
Also, if you have any tips I'd love to hear them too :)
For example, here are the things that make up most of the German accent of English:
- pronouncing "th" as "s" (Germans apparently don't know how to put one's tongue tip on the upper teeth)
- pronouncing "w" as "v" (like the German "w") instead of as "u"
- sharper pronounciation of initial vowels (i.e. when a word starts with a vowel) and "h"
I'll try to integrate some of the things you point out into my daily life, we'll see how it goes :D
Focusing hard on the vowels is the easiest way I know to get the resonance
The best way to work on your accent is to record yourself and listen to it. Ideally you would have a native say it in a native manner. Movies, TV shows, and particularly audiobooks (with the printed copy) can be a great sources to work on it.
I have encouraged my co-workers to correct my English lately (12 years in Australia). They've been teaching me some of the local sayings, and correcting my pronunciation etc... Things that in Spain would have been picked up and addressed much sooner.
I also told all my coworkers to correct me but of the 10 people I cpeak to often only one does, for which I am super thankfull.