Ask HN: How to Do Accent Reduction? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to Do Accent Reduction?

18 pointsacquiremoney43 comments

I am brown guy.I have been in usa for 2 years.One problem I have is that i got this thick south asian accent and also get fluent speaking english because during internship at the end thats only feedback i got from my manager that you are techinaclly sound but you do lack communication skills.So reason for asking the question here is to get advice and resources to solve my problem:)

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Firstly, there are many errors in the post above. If we assume that you talk like you have written here, then your speech accent is not the biggest problem.

There’s nothing wrong in focusing on accent reduction. But I’d suggest focusing on proper spelling and grammar while writing too. Most technical communications happen in writing (be they on email or chat) than through speech (though speech is very important in interviews and presentations, for example). Your return on time invested would be much higher focusing on writing and getting the proper use of English. That could also be a foundation for improving your speech.

Also, don’t get disheartened by the feedback. Learning another language well as an adult is hard. And English is harder (compared to some other European languages) to get right unless you’ve been exposed to the proper form for a long time. Give yourself a year or two and measure your progress regularly so that you can know how far you’ve come.

I tried to help by rewriting the post so he could see the errors. I wasn't able to understand what part of it is supposed to be saying (in brackets below). But there are lots of missing words (often "the" and "a"), missing spaces after periods, and lack of capitalization. Even in mine it is a bit awkward, but it is better.

"I am a brown guy. I have been in the US for 2 years. One problem I have is that I have a thick south Asian accent. [and also get fluent speaking English because during internship at the end] The only feedback I got from my manager is that I am technically sound but lack communication skills. So the reason for asking the question here is to get advice and resources to solve my problem."

The part about mastering English as a non-native speaker resonates with me. While starting with English is much easier than with romanic, germanic or slavic languages (because of its simpler grammar), pronounciation, idiomatic speech and the nuances of prepositions are almost impossible to get right unless you've got a talent with languages.

Try shadowing.

Shadowing is basically just playing audio and repeating what you hear as soon as you hear it. You can do it by just watching Netflix/youtube. The ideal setup is a pair of headphones and microphone that plays your own voice back into your headphones to help you hear yourself.

Focused shadowing sessions will increase your awareness of sounds that differ in your current spoken voice and your goal.

One more thing: Watch out for 'small' mistakes in your writing. No space between a period and the next sentence. Pronoun 'I' not being capitalized. Spelling mistakes. They tend not to cause communication problems but people may label you as having weak English because of them.

I actually worked on a startup to help with this. (We never got off the ground, unfortunately).

There are 2 main factors to focus on: Pronunciation, and tone.

Pronunciation is fairly straightforward; you can look up or listen to how words are pronounced to get a better understanding.

Tone is the tricky one. You need to learn how to correctly raise and lower your voice for individual syllables. Most native speakers have this hardwired in their minds, so you need to practice (a lot) to get the hang of it.

As an exercise, listen to some YouTube videos or podcasts with transcriptions. With one colored pen, highlight the syllables where the speaker raises their voice, and with another pen, highlight the syllables where they lower their voice. Then, practice speaking the sentence with the same tone.

It's a lot of hard work, but it's a skill that can indeed be learned.

I'm in the same boat. I'm French and have been living in the US for 3 years and I still have a thick accent. That being said I've improved.

To make my accent more "standard" I use a combination of the Elsa Speak app (https://elsaspeak.com/) and the American Accent Training by Ann Cook that comes with audio exercises that you can download. I can't praise the latter enough.

Changing your accent is long journey that requires dedication, but I'd say that with my app + book combo I'm seeing steady improvements.

Nearly everyone on my team is ESL: Russian, Korean, Chinese, German. Meetings can be a nightmare as everything gets repeated a few times. The Indian guys usually have the best English as they learn from young but accent can be strong. Congrats on working on it no one else seems to try:) .

One thing I have noticed is that ESL speakers even from very different languages seem to have an easier time understanding each other than I do as a native speaker. As someone with mild attention issues the frustration is real, especially in the kind of long half-important meeting in which it is sometimes quite important to follow along but other times completely unnecessary.

ESL speaker from Germany here. My experience is that I can cope really well with the accents that I understand, but I struggle really hard with new accents until I crack their code, so to say.

For example, the wife of a friend is from Turkey and is not very proficient in German, so we talk in English. The first few times it was really tough for me to understand anything, until I figured out how the Turkish accent works. For example, the Turkish accent replaces th -> t, e.g. "tank you" instead of "thank you", which was really confusing for me since I'm used to German ESL speakers who replace th -> s instead.

I know a speech pathologist (think speech therapy for kids) who also does accent reduction for adults. It's a lot of the same type of thing: learn to make this sound with a different part of your mouth, then practice until you can do it without thinking, and since adults tend to be less cooerced and more engaged, it can go quite quickly.

Without trying to be mean, your writing could use work too. Practice writing more formally: have instead of got (mostly); capitalize things that need capitals, like English and I; spell check; full sentances with subjects and verbs; a space after sentances.

Without trying to be mean, I find it ironic that you suggest using spell checking, yet spell the word "sentence" as "sentance" (as easy enough mistake for a non-native speaker). Sorry I don't mean to pick on you, I just found this amusing.

Ugh. A poor craftsman blames his tools, but my typing quality has gone way down since my phone stopped doing auto-spellcheck for me. Especially since auto-spell check everywhere else untrained my look twice for tricky words before pressing enter skill. :(

Also, it's apparently an easy enough mistake for a native speaker, too. :) English spelling is hard!

One tip from reading this post: I can see that you're writing sentences that are too long.

- Write simple small sentences.

- Put a space after your periods.

- For engineering communication use white-space liberally. This last one is not standard English writing style, but I love it for work communication.

I agree that writing short sentences is key. It seems most people are taught the opposite in school, and I know some English tests give you higher marks for longer sentences, so you have to get people to unlearn that bad habit.

I was taught to write a short sentence followed by a longer one, then back to short. This was for English literature, so not sure it is relevant for technical communication.

I did some research on pronunciation teaching. One of the tools I used was a speech analysis suit called Praat [1]. If you want to visually compare your pronunciation with that of a native speaker, I recommend it. Why would you do that? Because it can be hard to just rely on your ears alone to hear difference of others speech, and of your own. With Praat you can do things like see if your vowels are the same pattern of .. harmonics .. as an example. You can also see how the attack of consonants matches.. how your connected speech looks.

And then drill and drill some small point you want to work on until its second nature. You can do something similar with shadowing to. listen to a section of speech and try to say it at the exact same speed and intonation as the example. find the places where you trip up and drill them. Stand from the end of the sentence and work backwards getting more and more connected speech.

[1] https://praat.en.softonic.com/

Actual website: https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/ (I won't trust Softonic malware-like installer.)

thanks

are you certain that "lack of communication skills" == "your accent is hard to understand"?

other than that, i recommend watching English-speaking news, reading up on enunciation, copying what you hear, recording your voice and comparing it to what you're repeating, etc.

Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Well both actually.

Are you sure it's your accent and not your command of the language? Your comment has several grammatical errors, lacks common English idioms, and has some ambiguities that make it difficult to understand.

> also get fluent speaking english because during internship at the end thats only feedback i got

As an example, I'm not sure if your saying that you do speak fluently or don't here.

The hard truth before I offer reassurance, I would have a very hard time working with someone who wrote a message like the one you typed above.

Reassuringly, you can definitely improve your grammar with some classes. I've seen people go from far worse then your writing to totally fluent. Good luck!

"If you are interested in accent modification, you can contact a speech-language pathologist. Accent modification is not provided in the medical setting, so try a private practician or a nearby university that has a graduate program in communication disorders or speech-language pathology. Not every program will have a therapist with this type of experience. I know that Emerson College used to have an experience accent mod therapist, though that may have changed. Many therapists can provide services remotely if there's not someone near you." (Quoted from my partner, an SLP.)

I actually found a way to do this and it worked really really well.

Find an english song you like and know very well, record yourself singing it, it's gonna sound horrible trust me, listen to it, you're going to notice all the tiny mispronunciations because you know the song very well, and you also know how to pronounce it correctly for the same reason.

Now you have a good reference to work with, pay close attention and start fixing little by little.

It worked for me, maybe because I like playing guitar and signing, but I guess it can be done with other recordings as well, like TV shows or speeches.

It's not so much that you need to reduce your accent but that you must acquire a different accent, the one that happens to be mainstream. I don't know if that helps, but that is what a linguist would say. Everyone has an accent. It is just a matter of which is considered standard.

It seems like it would be hard for someone new to a language to even discern an accent. You have my congratulations for even becoming conversant in more than one language. I took several years of Spanish and still cannot carry on a conversation or read much of anything in it.

Accent is one thing, but mastering the language is helpful as well.

Nouns in English require an article unless they are:

     - proper nouns (names)
     - pronouns (he, him, her, it)
     - indefinite plural nouns ("nouns require...")
     - collective nouns ("pizza is delicious" "foliage is best viewed in autumn")

Avoid overusing ambiguous terms that are heavily context-dependent, like "got." Say what you mean: "have," "received," "was," "became," etc.

Example rewrite:

I am _a_ brown guy._I have been in _the_ [US] for 2 years._One problem I have is that [I] [have] this thick south asian accent (and also _I need to_ [become] _more_ fluent speaking [E]nglish), because during _my_ internship, at the end, that's _the_ only feedback _I_ [received] from my manager, that "[Y]ou are [technically] sound, but you do lack communication skills." So _the_ reason for asking the question here is to get advice and resources to solve my problem _with communication skills. _:)

Like others have already pointed out your challenge is not only your accent. If you tackle it as language ackquisition there is a large community for adults learning languages. Working in the US gives you a big advantage but immersion alone will not automatically solve all issues. In my experience you can benefit from language tandems. In this setup one has a conversation with a native speaker who learns your native language. Half of the time you speak your native language, the other half his/her native language. In this setup it is not as awkward to correct each other as it is in daily life conversations. Tandems can be online or in person. If you want to maximize your time speaking and being corrected you can pay some students to act as a teacher. I had some really good experiences while learning Italian on italki.com. Just look for community teacher. Unfortunately they no longer support forming tandems. But there are plenty of sites for this.

I learned French using the Pimsleur method - basically you listen and repeat things as you hear them in an audio course. As a result, my accent in French threw off native speakers in a way that made them think I was a native speaker.

I would look into if there is some similar audio based course in your native language that targets English.

My experience learning Spanish and French in classroom settings was that once most people see a word written, they fall back into a way of pronunciation that leans toward their native language and causes an accent. Audio only courses can help break that pattern.

The Pimsleur method should also help your use of “a” and “the” feel more natural which is going to help with your rhythm when speaking. Even as a native speaker, if I drop “a” and “the” I’m going to sound strange.

Immersion. Spend more time around people with accent similar to what you are looking for. You’ll pick nuances up. While watching movies and hearing podcasts, repeat and compare phrases you hear. Try to copy the intonation (I prefer iconic scenes personally:)

This is kind of speculative, but it might be easier to get away with an imperfect British accent than an imperfect American one in the US. One of my friends from India could do a very convincing British accent when needed.

Don't be afraid to mimic people: think of your stereotypes of the native accent/s and use them. It's not offensive; it's much better than persisting with your own accent. (I am delighted when I hear non-native English speakers using a southern British accent perfectly.)

Get the basic vowel sounds right: maybe you need to lengthen/shorten some of them. That should immediately make you more understandable.

One thing I recommend is making sure the English native speakers you talk to know that you want to improve your accent. Make them realize that you would welcome their corrections and suggestions.

Also, there's a big difference between accent and grammar. Make sure you work on both, because one without the other will still cause problems.

Some universities and schools offer accent reduction classes, for example Stanford’s ‘ Accent Reduction for Non-Native Speakers of English’, which is available as a remote class for anyone.

Any English school or coach can also help.

I know of a language learning app that specializes in accent reduction: https://www.bluecanoelearning.com/

There are voice coaches who do this professionally either remote by video or in person (voice coaches do lots of different things, find one who is interested in your kind of business)

This could be a startup idea. I’m sure there are lots of tech companies that would pay lots of money so that their employees could master English and improve their accents.

It's a solved problem that remains unsolved for other reasons. I've seen this tried a bit and... not always a great success.

Often a HR 'initiative' or management whim to buy a product or hire someone dedicated to this, but it's got to have management momentum.

Take a call centre - easy to add into feedback, measure, monitor, should gel with on-the-job performance, the feedback often with a dedicated QA or QA team providing input.

Take a (classic, bigorg) development team - not so much regular communication (spoken), and what there is gets stuffed into conference calls and [fake] 'scrums'. Those that already have good communication (and technical) skills do OK, those hired for technical skills (with language and softer skills taking a back seat, as when a role is created or becomes free then filling it with someone reasonably up-to-speed becomes the priority - I know this is setting yourself up to fail - and 'language' a long term improvement target - if someone's gone through 10 years+ of English language education I don't think 2 hours coaching per week, now with a fulltime job, perhaps getting married, social life, perhaps kids, other hobbies, is going to work but for all but the most committed).

It's a solved problem. What's not solved is banging management head against the wall with (long term) bad-fit hires OR giving staff a proper amount of time (10 hours pr week, company time, personal time as they choose) to allow them to develop as a long term fit with the company.

And on development conference calls - so so so many times dominated by someone in a position of seniority or more fluent language to the extent no one else gets a chance to get practice of making a substantial and cooperative (i.e. discuss, not just blast what's been done) contribution and having a discussion (going round "what's achieved, what are you doing, any roadblocks" doesn't count).

Also I would say at this time where wfh is significant part of job market.Communication skills are more important than before

On Writing Well by William Zinsser (to address the writing points people are bringing up).

I would reframe the problem so you can solve it. You can’t just ditch an accent. Communicate with simpler sentences and better body language (nodding etc).

If you need clarification during a conversation, wait until it’s over and shoot over a message in Chat. Use this sparingly so you don’t seem annoying.

Watch more American movies.

You absolutely can alter/reduce an accent, albeit with potentially large effort if starting from non-native; worst case, a speech therapist should be able to help, but even without that you can adjust by paying attention. I mean, yes, you can/should mitigate issues in the meantime but it is doable.

You can 'just ditch an accent' if you can mimic someone else's accent.

Yes, but that can certainly be overdone.

That's how you end up intending to say "Than you very much" in French, but actually saying "Thanks, nice ass!"

Not that I know from personal experience or anything.

┐(‘～`)┌

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