Your Accent Isn't Why People Can't Understand You

معنی واژه با لمس

1. 0:00You're speaking to someone in English.
2. 0:03The words are coming.
3. 0:05You're feeling really good.
4. 0:07But then you see it.
5. 0:10It's that look, that slight frown, and then, " Sorry, but I'm not following you." Your heart sinks.
6. 0:21Your brain does what it always does in that moment.
7. 0:24It goes straight to the same thought, " They noticed.
8. 0:28They noticed that I sound different.
9. 0:31It's my accent.
10. 0:32They can't understand me because of how I speak English." Hey, welcome back, and a big welcome to anyone who's joining us for the very first time.
11. 0:53This is the Confident English Podcast.
12. 0:56I'm your host, Emma, the founder of Hey Lady!, an online community that brings women together from all around the world to practise speaking English.
13. 1:08Every week, right here, we break down the barriers that keep you from speaking with confidence, whether that's at work, while you're travelling, or in everyday life.
14. 1:21If you've been learning English for a long time and you're still struggling to speak up, then you are in exactly the right place.
15. 1:29I'm really glad that you're here and that we've got time to dive into this episode together.
16. 1:43Now, a fabulous question from Lan inspired today's episode.
17. 1:49She writes to me from Vietnam.
18. 1:52She says, " Emma, I met you when you were my teacher in Ho Chi Minh City many years ago.
19. 1:59I watched all your YouTube videos since then.
20. 2:03My city has many tourists.
21. 2:05I try and speak with them for practising my English.
22. 2:09But they don't understand me.
23. 2:12I always say,"Sorry for my accent".
24. 2:15And I feel so discouraged, like shame.
25. 2:20How can I fix my accent?" Lan, thank you so much for writing and sharing this.
26. 2:26I know that after spending so much time studying and memorising English, it's a horrible feeling when people don't understand you when you speak.
27. 2:37And to you, it's your accent.
28. 2:40That's the most obvious explanation, the most obvious problem.
29. 2:46And you're right, those tourists, they're unable to understand you fully because the sounds that you're making as you speak English are not obvious or recognisable to them, and that's where the communication breaks down.
30. 3:02But I want to share a slightly different take on this today, a different way of understanding what is actually happening in that moment.
31. 3:11Because Lan, I don't think that your accent is the problem here.
32. 3:17And by the end of this episode, I hope that I can show you why.
33. 3:27Let's start with something that sounds simple, but it matters much more than you might think.
34. 3:34Everyone has an accent.
35. 3:36Every single person who speaks English has one.
36. 3:40I have one.
37. 3:42You have one.
38. 3:44A woman from London sounds different to a woman from Texas or Singapore or Nigeria, and they all speak English, and they all sound different.
39. 3:55And your accent is what tells people your story, where you're from, your country, your community, and probably the teachers who helped to shape the way that you first learned to speak You have an accent in your first language and you have an accent in English.
40. 4:16It is all part of who you are.
41. 4:20But the question is, is your accent the reason why people find it difficult to understand you?
42. 4:28Two linguistic professors asked this exact question, and for anyone who's interested, I've linked Munro and Derwing's research down in the show notes.
43. 4:39But they found that even heavily accented speech can still be understood, and the reason for that is because listeners typically adjust within about 60 seconds of time speaking with someone.
44. 4:57So Lan, if you are holding that conversation for longer than 60 seconds, those tourists should be able to adjust and adapt to the way that you sound.
45. 5:09So the truth is, a strong accent is not the reason that you are being misunderstood.
46. 5:16You can have a noticeable accent, and you can still communicate your message clearly and accurately.
47. 5:24So if your accent is not the problem, then what is?
48. 5:29Almost always it's pronunciation and your delivery.
49. 5:36Accent and pronunciation, they are not the same thing, but they are connected.
50. 5:42The sounds of your first language shapes the way that you deliver English, and that is completely normal and natural.
51. 5:52English uses sounds that just don't exist in some languages or sound combinations that don't frequently occur together, and so they're unfamiliar.
52. 6:04They don't come naturally or easily, and therefore our brains are wired to default to sounds that are more familiar, more recognisable, the sounds from our first language.
53. 6:19And this becomes part of what we hear as an accent.
54. 6:24Pronunciation is what helps us to speak clearly.
55. 6:27When we speak clearly, we can be easily understood even with an accent.
56. 6:39Pronunciation is not only about producing individual sounds in English, it's also about how you deliver those sounds, the rhythm, the pace, the stress.
57. 6:53And I want to give you an example.
58. 6:55English is a stressed timed language, so certain words in every sentence carry more weight than others.
59. 7:05The important words, words like nouns and verbs, the ones that carry the meaning, they get stressed, and the smaller connecting words, they often soften or reduce down.
60. 7:20Listen to this sentence: We're going to the concert tonight.
61. 7:26Listen to this sentence: So in that sentence, going, concert, tonight, these are all the stressed words, the words that clearly give us meaning, and the functional grammatical words between, they drop down, they reduce, and they are often unstressed.
62. 7:46Listen to this sentence: Now, many other languages don't work this way.
63. 7:50Listen to this sentence: Vietnamese, for example, is a syllable timed language, so each syllable is given roughly equal weight in a sentence.
64. 8:01Listen to this sentence: So that same sentence spoken with roughly the same amount of stress on each syllable will sound completely different.
65. 8:09Listen to this sentence: It will sound like, "We are going to the concert tonight." Hear the difference?
66. 8:18Listen to this sentence: Now, for an English speaker, it's not impossible to understand this, but as a listener, you do need to work harder to try and identify the words and the meaning.
67. 8:31Listen to this sentence: The familiar stress pattern of English is missing from that sentence, so a native speaker might need to ask you to repeat what you said one more time before they understand.
68. 8:44Listen to this sentence: But if you learn to follow the patterns of spoken English, then you will absolutely be understood even with your accent.
69. 8:53Listen to this sentence: And the good news is that learning the sounds and the patterns of English, this is something that anyone can do, and it's much less complicated than trying to change your accent.
70. 9:12Listen to this sentence: There is something that you can start practising today, right now, by yourself, that will make a real difference to how clearly you speak, and it's called shadowing.
71. 9:25Listen to this sentence: If you've been learning with me, you've been watching my YouTube videos for a while, you'll recognise this.
72. 9:32Listen to this sentence: My imitation technique is built on this exact idea, and I'll link some examples of the imitation technique down in the show notes so that you can try it yourself if you haven't seen them before.
73. 9:45Listen to this sentence: Basically, you need to find an English speaker whose pace and energy feels right to you, someone that you like to listen to.
74. 9:56Listen to this sentence: Now, it could be this podcast, or maybe a YouTube channel that you regularly watch.
75. 10:02Listen to this sentence: Ideally, it's somewhere where you can see the captions or the transcript.
76. 10:08Listen to this sentence: And instead of just watching the video, you speak along with the speaker.
77. 10:15Listen to this sentence: So you listen to a sentence, you pause, and you repeat it again after them.
78. 10:22Listen to this sentence: And then after you've done it a few times, you can switch to shadowing, and you speak while they speak, so you follow their rhythm.
79. 10:32Listen to this sentence: You copy how they stress certain words and how they let others go quiet.
80. 10:38Listen to this sentence: You can even copy their facial expressions and their gestures, the physical shape that they make as they deliver English.
81. 10:48Listen to this sentence: You're not just trying to sound more like them, you're trying to feel what it's like to speak with that rhythm and to feel that from the inside Shadowing is great because it trains your ears, it trains your muscle memory, and your pronunciation skills all at the same time.
82. 11:07Listen to this sentence: So it is a deeply useful practise.
83. 11:10Listen to this sentence: It's something that you can do on your own at any time and as often as you can.
84. 11:23Listen to this sentence: Practising your pronunciation on your own will definitely take you a long way, but at some point you need to bring what you've been practising into real conversations with real people, because that's where you get to test it, right?
85. 11:39Listen to this sentence: You get real time feedback, and you get to find out if what you've been practising is actually having an impact.
86. 11:47Listen to this sentence: Now, I know that this thought can be really intimidating.
87. 11:51Listen to this sentence: You're imagining yourself speaking with fast-talking native speakers, right?
88. 11:57Listen to this sentence: The good news is you don't have to start there.
89. 12:01Listen to this sentence: You can, and you will improve your pronunciation by speaking with a wide range of English accents.
90. 12:10Listen to this sentence: Something that I always hear students say is, "Oh, I can only speak with native speakers.
91. 12:18Listen to this sentence: If I speak with other English learners, I'll just learn to make their mistakes, too." This is simply not true.
92. 12:26Listen to this sentence: Well, there's two exceptions to this.
93. 12:29Listen to this sentence: If you speak with only one person in English for years and years, then yes, you will likely pick up elements of their accent as well, but it takes years.
94. 12:41Listen to this sentence: The other exception is you want to try and avoid always speaking with other English speakers who have the same pronunciation challenges as you do, because you can easily understand each other even though others might not.
95. 12:59Listen to this sentence: But when you speak regularly with people who have lots of different accents, you will learn to adapt and adjust your English accent so that you can be more easily understood by more people.
96. 13:13Listen to this sentence: You get to find out what words you're not saying clearly, what words you have to repeat again until you are understood.
97. 13:22Listen to this sentence: In learning where you're not being clear, you're prompted to make adjustments and corrections until you are, and this can happen really naturally in real live conversations.
98. 13:36Listen to this sentence: And so as much as it's uncomfortable when someone doesn't understand you, it is the clearest signal that you have that there is a part of your pronunciation that you need to adjust or to work on.
99. 13:56Listen to this sentence: So will your accent completely change just by speaking more English?
100. 14:02Listen to this sentence: Well, in a way, yes, but it really does depend on how much you speak and who you speak to.
101. 14:10Listen to this sentence: In the same way that accents are shaped by the language that you grew up with, accents can be influenced by the people that you're surrounded by.
102. 14:19Listen to this sentence: When you spend a lot of time speaking with people who sound different from you, then you start to adjust almost naturally with time.
103. 14:31Listen to this sentence: Heavy accents tend to soften quite a bit because the speaker needs to adjust how they sound in order to be understood by the people that they're spending time with.
104. 14:43Listen to this sentence: And your accent will soften too.
105. 14:46Listen to this sentence: If you spend more time talking to different people with different accents, then you will learn how to adjust the way that you speak so that others can understand you clearly as well.
106. 14:59Listen to this sentence: So Lan, don't convince yourself that you need to fix or you need to lose your accent and get a new one.
107. 15:07Listen to this sentence: But you can improve aspects of your pronunciation that will make it much easier for other people to understand you as you speak English.
108. 15:22Listen to this sentence: Any member of our community knows that Hey Lady! is a great place to gain experience meeting and talking to people with different accents.
109. 15:32Listen to this sentence: When you experience many different English accents, Italian, Brazilian, Korean, Vietnamese, you start hearing what actually makes English clear across all of them, the stress, the emphasis, the clarity of sounds.
110. 15:53Listen to this sentence: And learning to recognise the differences between accents is a genuinely useful skill.
111. 16:00Listen to this sentence: Because when you think about it, four out of five people who speak English in the world today, they're not native speakers.
112. 16:09Listen to this sentence: So when you can hear their accents then your ability to understand the accents of native speakers also improves.
113. 16:17Listen to this sentence: You build that flexibility into your listening skills as well.
114. 16:22Listen to this sentence: So if more speaking practice is what you're looking for, then I'm inviting you to come and give Hey Lady! a try.
115. 16:29Listen to this sentence: The link is down in the description to start a free seven-day trial.
116. 16:35Listen to this sentence: It's down in the show notes, down in the description.
117. 16:38Listen to this sentence: And as always, I would love to hear from you.
118. 16:42Listen to this sentence: Is there a specific pronunciation challenge that is holding you back from speaking English clearly?
119. 16:49Listen to this sentence: If so, send me a message.
120. 16:52Listen to this sentence: You can write in so that I can answer your question on our podcast as well.
121. 16:57Listen to this sentence: Thank you so much for joining me today.
122. 17:00Listen to this sentence: If there is one thing that I hope you take away from this episode, it's that it's not your accent that is a problem that needs to be fixed.
123. 17:10Listen to this sentence: It is your pronunciation, and you can certainly train your ears, your muscle memory to speak clearly and to be understood.
124. 17:20Listen to this sentence: I will see you for the next episode next week!