5 Tips You Need to Know to Get an American Accent (with Jesús Flórez)

🔗 Download the transcript here: https://ko-fi.com/s/5a0d6e9f90

➡️ Jesús's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JesusFlorezEnglish

🌟 Episode Highlights

• 5 tips to improve your American accent
• how to track your progress
• what is the difference between accent and pronunciation

Find me on social media!  ➪ @missjeanteaches

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Transcript

JEAN: Hello, hello! Welcome, or welcome back, to English Extras. I'm Jean. I'm an English teacher and a content creator. And today I have a very special guest with me. Jesús, welcome to English Extras. This has been a long time coming. I am so glad to finally get you on the podcast.

JESÚS: Yes, I absolutely echo the sentiments. It has been a long time in the making, but finally we've found a good time that works for both of us, and here I am. Happy to be here.

JEAN: So, you are an accent coach specifically for the American accent. It's quite an interesting job to have, especially because you are not a native English speaker, but you are mistaken for a native English speaker all the time because your accent is so good. So, before we dive into your tips and tricks for accent reduction and training, can you give us a little bit of your background and how you got to where you are now?

JESÚS: So, the very short version of the story is that I've been learning this language in one way or another for more than 20 years. I like to say that it all started when I was 14 years old. And that's because at the time, that was the first time that I had a chance to do—or go to—one of these independent language schools, in addition to my regular schooling. I think it makes sense to start there because it's a very clear starting point. What I learned going through my regular curriculum was forgettable, as is the case for most people. This is what really starts a before-and-after moment in my language learning journey. 

And so basically that starts there, and you fast forward all these years—there's been a lot of self-learning involved—and the interest in accent training actually started at 18. That's another story in and of itself. But I've been refining this accent since 2008, and that would be around 18 years at this point.

And I think this is where I can actually start getting into the meat of the topic today, which is giving you and your audience a blueprint for what an American accent sounds like.

I like to start with a foundational notion here, and that is this idea that I'm not coming up with on my own. I'm actually just borrowing this from Dr. David Alan Stern. Some of you might have heard about him. He's been in the accent coaching business for decades. And he has this term called mid-tongue muscularity. 

There are other ways to refer to this, but this is what I really want you to take away. All accents exist in what we can call an ecosystem. And for a general or standard American accent, this means that mid-tongue muscularity—also sometimes referred to as resonance—is something that takes some thinking to really grasp, because this is not an individual sound or an articulator. This is broad. This is where all these sounds are existing or coexisting and interacting with one another. And the idea is that in most American accents, we get the vocal energy from somewhere in the middle of your vocal tract. I always like to think of it as coming from here. And also, it has a very open and relaxed feeling. It's kind of deep as well.

One way that you can start to get a sense for this is by looking at two things. The first one is the way that we articulate—or one of the ways that we articulate—the L sound in English. A lot of your audience, I'm sure, and you yourself know about the dark L label. It's a way to simplify something that gets very technical when you go into phonology, which is a velarized L sound. That means that the L sound, in addition to the point of articulation right there in the gum ridge—the alveolar articulatory point—there's also something called co-articulation. Basically, the back of your tongue is raised a little bit around here. And that creates that distinctive L sound. It is very different from a simple alveolar L sound, which is what you would get in Spanish, for instance. So that's one way to begin exploring that mid-tongue muscularity.

Another one is to remember that relaxing your lips also gives you a sense for that resonance or ecosystem. If you pay attention to most American English speakers, there isn't a whole lot of—well, lip movement—when speech is being produced, and you can actually get away with, you know, kind of lazy looks, and that actually in fact gives you a much clearer and believable American accent.

That's as far as the ecosystem is concerned. This is a little bit nebulous and I get it. It is. I'm still trying to find ways to articulate this and present it to people. But I think that those two points go a long way in giving you a basic understanding. What I will say from this point on is actually much more in line with the majority of advice out there on YouTube and other sources, so it'll be a lot easier to understand.

Before I do that though, a couple of things. Avoid the trap of over-articulating every letter or every sound represented by letters. This goes hand-in-hand with what I just said about relaxing your lips in order to hit that American resonance or muscularity. And also going with this you get the fact that native, or native-like, clarity comes from reduction in rhythm, not effort.

So, with that out of the way, let's get into very actionable things that you can start doing today to develop your American accent.

The first one is the schwa sound. You've heard this a million times and there are virtually an endless number of videos out there exploring or explaining this, so I don't really have to get into much detail here. Just remember this: every word that has two or more syllables has one or more that are unstressed, and so every vowel letter can become the schwa sound, which is the sound of an unstressed syllable. And so you get words such as "amazing"—we have the same A letter in the spelling, however the pronunciation is very different when you compare that first and the second syllable, which is where the stress goes. Amazing. It's always good to gesture with your hands to get a feel for that rhythmic pattern of English. And then the word "president." I'm pronouncing it very slowly and carefully now so you really hear that but there we have two schwas. President. In fact, one way to think of schwa is as a grunt. And very often in some words we are dropping it completely, which is why you get a phenomenon such as "family" sounding the way that it does. But it is possible to not drop the schwa sound and get "fam-i-ly." It's more unusual, but you can still find it. But what most people do is just drop that second syllable completely and you get "fam-ly."

Number two, the flap T sound. The classic example—and it will never get old—is the word "water." It'll never get old. But it really is exhibit A of what happens there. You have a T sound in an unstressed syllable position, and for ease of articulation, we make it really fast, or you simplify it. If you speak Spanish, you have a bit of an advantage because it is virtually the same sound that is represented by a single R letter. They're not totally identical, but basically you can just substitute it for that and you get it. And then the words "better" and "city," for instance. 

Remember this: we only do this when we are talking about unstressed syllables. If you compare words such as "attic"—A-T-T-I-C—or an attack, in the word "attack" we pronounce that T sound fully because it is in a stressed syllable position.

Number three: thought groups and linking, word connections. So remember, there are many scenarios in which we link words together. I'm not going to get into that here today, but remember the following. When we speak, we break up our speech in chunks or segments, and within those chunks or segments, that's where linking occurs. The examples I have here today are only about connecting a final consonant sound to an initial vowel sound in the following word. And so you get "an apple" or the phrase "get it."

Number four: intonation, but specifically about pitch drop. We use pitch accent in English. To oversimplify things is that intonation refers to the way the voice goes up and down over a stream of speech. The pitch accent comes into play when we talk about individual syllables within words, and so there is always a contrast present.

One way to also think about an American accent in terms of pitch accent is that the basic structure is steps up and steps down, that marked difference in the pitch. The classic example that I think of all the time is the word "present" or "present". In that word, the stress creates a difference in meaning. For pitch drop here: what I want to just focus on is the fact that in declarative statements (sentences) we lower the voice on the final syllable of the final word. As in, "I'm going to the store," or "that sounds great."

And finally, the American R sound. I leave it last because you can acquire a believable American accent and have something that we sometimes call non-rhoticity. You’re gonna find them—they exist, non-rhotic American accents. They break the mold. They really do, and they strike you when you hear them. But basically, just to reiterate a lot of the advice out there: R is a sound that in English does not require a contact between the tongue and other articulators in your mouth. The tongue pulls back and bunches in the middle. So "car," or a word such as "rock"—especially in an initial position—you really get that retroflex tongue movement, less so at the end of a word. And also the word “were”—you really hear it there. That will do it for my five bullet points.

JEAN: My biggest question, or my first question is going to be about expectations for progress, because probably the most common pain point for my audience is wanting to progress quickly, and also progressing at all. There's a lot of frustration, a lot of people saying, "I'm not progressing. I've been doing it for six months, for a year." But I want my audience to have a clear understanding of what to expect. What would progress look like, and how quickly can they expect to make progress?

JESÚS: You know, it's always very difficult to quantify something like this. Even in my own experience, I've never really bothered to quantify how long this has taken for me to accomplish. What I would say to you—what I would say to your audience—is this: the very first thing is to expect that you are going to feel uncomfortable adopting these changes, making them habits. I think from a psychological standpoint, that discomfort is one of the first things that you should embrace or accept. That was something that I had to do: come to the realization that this feels weird and awkward, and it should, because this is not the way that my other language works. And so, beginning with that, I feel, is fundamental. Deal with that discomfort, that feeling of uncomfortableness.

And then I think that gives you a good starting point. Beyond that, in order to—I mean, I'm not exactly sure how to quantify something like this again, just to be perfectly transparent—but I feel that after you have that initial awareness, progress is going to come in the form of small realizations, or a convergence of small victories. 

Let's say that you really want to focus—and this would be my recommendation—on unstressing, or really reducing, those unstressed vowels and syllables within words. A small victory would be noticing that this happens. Begin with that. Notice that this happens. Then you can set aside as much time as you need or want to drill it. Once you are aware that syllables are reduced—in my experience, it comes down to drilling, and that is just simply the way that it is. And it can get boring and monotonous, and I get it. It happens. But the formation of the new habit will not come about in any other way. You can do things to make it more enjoyable, or to find different sources of motivation. But I believe–as you yourself have touched on before—motivation only takes you so far. You need consistency in order to do something like this.

That’s what I would say there. The quantification is going to be completely up to you and to your individual circumstances, and it may take more time than my experience, or it may take less time. My inclination is to say that nowadays this takes way less time than it did back in the day. You have an overabundance of resources now. I did not have that luxury.

JEAN: Such a good point. Yes. Such a good point. Now is a fantastic time to learn any language, but especially English, because of the bountiful resources available. So it sounds like—to kind of recap what you said—if you are feeling uncomfortable, you're going in the right direction, because you're moving away from what you know, which is your first language and the sound system of your first language. So if you're feeling uncomfortable, if it feels weird, you're headed in the right direction. And yeah, when it comes to sounds and accents, it is difficult to quantify—like, how do you put it into numbers? What would you say to recording yourself for the purpose of tracking your progress?

JESÚS: I feel that there's definitely a place for that. I didn't do much of that, at least initially. I was more open to the idea later on in my journey, but even then I still had that reluctance to do it, and I get it—it's a very common experience to be shocked by how different your voice sounds in your head, because of biology, as opposed to listening to it on a recording. 

I'm going to say yes, do it. But in order to make it really useful, you have to have someone who can review it and point out some things that you are probably not going to pick up on on your own. That's what I would say about that. I feel that you really need to have that feedback element, and it's really hard to give feedback on yourself in a meaningful way.

JEAN: Absolutely. Like, when it comes to accent, you have to have the ear for it, which is one reason why prioritizing listening can really help you with improving your accent and your overall pronunciation, because you can start to develop an ear for it. But if you're not quite there yet, then yes—this is something I'll say to everyone—if you're looking for somebody who can review it, Jesús is your guy. 

JESÚS: Shameless plug! No, absolutely. I believe I have the expertise to do something like that. I want to bring this up real quick before I forget, and that is just to give your audience some more food for thought here. Because a lot of the time when we use the terms "accent" and "pronunciation," we're using them interchangeably. And we can do that. A lot of the time, for a non-specialist audience, there's no need to differentiate between the two. But there is a difference that linguists make when they talk about accents.

And I want to take this from the Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics by David Crystal and Alan Yu, in its seventh edition. On page 3, you're going to find a definition of an accent which is quite technical, but I believe that we can break it down here very simply. You see, an accent is “the cumulative auditory effect of those features of pronunciation which identify where a person is from regionally and socially.” The point is that an accent comes down to the effect that different pronunciation features bundled together have on your listener.

And this is why a lot of the time the advice focuses on pronunciation refinement and not accent refinement. The bottom line here is that accents are markers of identity, but they come as a result of smaller features converging and presenting a past history. 

A lot of the time we think about regional accents, and there's a reason for that. When you have the presence of different characteristics, you can have a pretty good guess as to where someone came from. It gets more difficult, I believe, socially speaking, because it depends on how common it is to speak about social strata in your native culture. I don't think that there's a whole lot of that here in the US, but in other places you really get a marked difference between, let's say, working class accents—maybe white collar accents as opposed to blue collar accents.

But yes—think mostly of the accent as the effect that your pronunciation is having on your listener's perception when it comes to guessing where someone can be from. So I want to leave you with that too. Do you have to aim for a perfect accent? Not necessarily, unless you really wanted to attain it. And I believe it is possible to do it. But just be aware that if you really want to get to the science of it, this is what you would get from a very reliable source. Here, we mostly focus on pronunciation refinement. The accent, you know, can come along as a result of additional work.

JEAN: Fantastic. That is such a great point to end on, this difference between pronunciation and accent. So thank you so much for laying that out for everybody, because that really is an important difference that not everybody is aware of. You're right, we tend to use them interchangeably. 

So, thank you so much for being here today, for joining us here, for sharing your expertise with us. I want to encourage everybody to check out Jesús's YouTube channel, which will be linked down in the description. Jesús, do you have anything else that you would like to let the audience know before we go?

JESÚS: Continue to practice your English every day. I know that this channel's focus is on general English proficiency, so I would just encourage you to continue practicing: making daily habits, habit stacking, as they call it these days. I hope that you enjoyed everything that I said here today. Just ruminate on these things. I think there's great value here for you.

JEAN: Absolutely. I 100% agree. Well, thank you, Jesús, again, and hopefully we will have you back on at some point in the future.

JESÚS: Absolutely. I'm looking forward to that. All right, everyone. Have a good day, and we'll see you later.

JEAN: See you next time. Bye!