How to get rid of accent?

Marvin A. wrote:

>> Out of curiosity, what country are you from originally? << If you're tired of that question, why not just answer "Texas", or something like that. Or tell them you have a speech impedimentum.

Hahaha. I like the Texas idea.

I've read every single post on every single page in this thread and found that there were only a couple of semi-helpful posts. Everyone else is assuming that this is a personal development forum and those who want to get rid of an accent need to be persuaded otherwise. If you don't know how to help, please stay away, there's no need to express your delight with foreign accents.

Ok, so in order to NOT make an empty post like the others I'll state what my friend told me about losing an accent...

Basically, you need to record yourself speaking and listen to it to see if it sounds right. Because when we speak we do not hear ourselves how others hear - half of the sound comes from bones vibrating. Also if you add the imaginary part where you think you sound like you want to sound, not the way it really is, then things become detached from reality. This is why recording is important - so that you can listen to yourself like others do.

So:
- Listent to a phrase of 'pure' English.
- Record yourself repeating it.
- Listen to your recording.
- Repeat until your recording sounds like the one you're trying to imitate.

Just like they do with the little kids.

So the advice of listening to radio, watching TV and talking to people is good, but only takes you so far - you need to feed your own sound back into your ears in a proper way. You already know what you want to sound like, but now you need to know the differences between what you want and what you have and work on acquiring the missing bits.

This requires extra equipment and effort. Maybe someone has a less laborious way of achieving this sort of improvement.

Please refrain from posting encouraging or discouraging thoughts about losing the accent. Just the facts, please.

Hope this helps.

Andrei

me too I hate my accent

Ahh...if you do know English fluently this would be easier than if you didn't (obviously ).  It depends on where you are coming from as to how you can rid you accent.  I knew someone who came from outside Moscow, and after a year he dropped his accent.  I also know people who came from Russia but still retain their accent.  It all depends on your ability to adapt to a new style of procunciation.  I can generally pull of a British Accent (I having the typical American Accent), a Scottish Accent, an Irish Accent (my family being from there), and others.  This is easier for me to adapt to these than other non-english languages due to the fact that they use the same grammatical structure just using a different part of thei mouth or tounge for each word.  Now when I speak Spanish, it'll be more difficult to drop the accent since they grew up speaking in a way that I am not familiar with.  It can take some time to learn how to pronounce correctly, and it's a great skill to master as well.  It really gets into details.  For instance, when you have a word in Spanish like Vaca (Cow), an English Speaker (and many other languages) would say "va-ka", but.....in Spanish you would pronounce it "ba-ka".  All of these little details take quite a while to remember, although it's much easier if you were to live in the country where the accent you want to master is spoken.  Also realize that it will sound like you have an accent to yourself, but you may not to the person with the native toungue.