Thoughts on how to improve English pronunciation by wrecking your native language

Okay, no misunderstandings here, please! I’m not talking about ridiculing languages that aren’t English. I’m talking about using them with a sense of humour to help you understand English pronunciation in a powerful way.

There’s a particular exercise that I love to do with my clients. At first they think I’m crazy. But then they begin to understand the purpose. Once they truly get into it, it’s ridiculously fun and very very enlightening.

I’ll begin by having them translate a simple sentence or two into their native language, be it Spanish, Polish, Arabic, French, Mandarin, whatever. It can be as simple as “My name is [XXX] and I’m studying English pronunciation. Then I’ll ask them to pretend they’re anglophones trying to learn this foreign language, but with no feeling for the language at all, none whatsoever!!! It sounds terrible – truly awful!! The English-speaker just can’t manage to imitate the accent: wrong sounds, wrong syllable stress, wrong word stress … wrong … wrong… wrong. But it’s so bad that it’s cute. It makes you laugh in a loving way. The idea is to be playful and outrageous, by really trying to capture the authentic sound of the English language transferred to your native language.

There’s no anger, no frustration – just lots of love and appreciation for this anglophone trying so hard and failing miserably.

Why do this exercise that seems so pointless and silly?

Simple –– the more you can “massacre” the accent of your native language with an English-speaker’s accent, the better you understand the essence of the Canadian accent (or standard North American accent, whatever you want to call it). Where does the tongue need to go? How wide does your mouth have to open? What’s the shape of your lips? How different is it from what you would automatically do?

It actually takes a lot of thought. It’s not so easy.

And you tend to want to speak quickly because it’s easier to slip back into the accent that comes naturally. But you’ve got to slow down – be deliberate. Pretend you’re that anglophone. Think of yourself in different clothes, maybe with a different hair colour. Anything – just pretend. Step into the shoes of this imaginary anglophone.

What makes it so difficult for them to adapt to your accent? Insert the sounds that don’t exist in your native language: for example, that pointed vowel /a/ as is black (/æ/); that rhotic /r/ back in the throat with the tip of your tongue down, pulling back and up. Think of the vowels and consonants that have been especially difficult for you to correct in English and use them to replace the consonants and vowels in your language. You want to make your own language sound as terrible as you can.

You’re really being two people: the anglophone who’s wrecking the sound of your native language and the native speaker who’s listening with amusement (if not outright laughter) at just how far from authentic it sounds.

You’re putting yourself inside the body and the mind of the English speaker trying to speak your language. So really exaggerate the differences. Don’t be afraid to make it totally absurd. How does their foreign accent sound in your native language? How do their sounds feel inside your mouth?

It’s a surprisingly powerful and revealing exercise.

Have you, the speaker of ESL, or your clients/students (if you’re a coach or a teacher) ever tried it? If you’ve done it or used it, tell me how it worked. What sentences did you use?

And don’t forget to check out the latest word-of-the week at One-Minute Words on The Canadian Pronunciation Coach YouTube channel.

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Thoughts on Identity and the Music of Language

I was always aware of the question of “identity” in accent modification, but it didn’t really hit me in the face until, as I mentioned in last week’s post Thoughts on “Identity” and Accent Modification, one of my clients brought it up in class. She talked with great insight about the internal shame she had absorbed related to accent modification as well as the loss of identity (feeling like a fake) in choosing to take on the accent of the native speaker.

Not all students are dealing with the psychological trauma of political tensions in their native country. However, the issue of feeling like a “fake” is something I’d heard before.

But what if we were to focus instead on the music of language? What if we could step outside our fixed ideas of identity and adopt a more open and fluid sense of self?

In my hometown Toronto, we can turn on CBC radio or Radio Canada (Canada’s English and French national broadcasting systems) and hear artists singing in languages other than English or French. We can hear music from Africa, Latin America, South America, for example –– and that, without even searching out a specialty radio station. We may not understand the words, but we respond to the rhythm and the melodies. As we listen and respond viscerally, for that brief period we become one with the music.

Can we do the same with spoken language – listen for its music and respond with the innocence of a child? Can we take the time to listen in a new way and go beyond the words? Can we go beyond consonants and vowels, beyond the memory of muscles and mind? Can we embrace new rhythms and melodies by putting aside assumptions about who we think we need to be by listening with attention to the musicality of the speech around us and absorbing it without judgment?

After all, we can learn to sing a song in a language other than our own and dance to the music of a country far away from home. We may not be the best singer or the best dancer but we can sing and dance with abandon. In the same way, it’s not about losing an accent. It’s about flowing with more of the sounds of the everyday speech and dialect, the vernacular, of the adopted language.

Far from being a “fake” for reshaping a native accent with the music of the vernacular,  I think we become richer. We experience a little shift, knowing that we’re no less who we are for embracing a place in the middle with enough room for everyone in the music of English.

And speaking of everyday speech, check out “ vernacular” in this week’s One-Minute Words.

 

Thoughts on “Identity” and Accent Modification

The other day there was a client in one of my group classes who made the most interesting observation. This person was, as are most of my clients, a very advanced speaker of ESL. She had been in English-speaking countries for the last ten years and was picking up the sounds of vowels and consonants very quickly. But finding the “music” of English was particularly challenging: the idea of linking consonants and vowels from syllable to syllable to find a flowing rhythm, and changing pitch to find melodies that express meaning more readily.  There was also some resistance to what I call “short-form” English, the spoken expressions that we native English speakers use all the time but which have almost nothing to do with written English (e.g., wanna, gonna, gotta, hafta).

There were two issues that came up, both equally important.

The first was political. In my client’s native country, there are two large populations with different languages. When speaking the language of the majority population with the accent of the majority population, her own community judged her harshly. They wanted and expected a more guttural sound in keeping with the native language of her community.

In learning to speak the English language, she had absorbed the “shame” of her community’s judgment – the implication that speaking a language other than your own with the accent of the native speaker was, perhaps the gentle word is, a “sellout.”

The second,  which I’ve sometimes heard from other clients, was that she felt that by imitating our “short-form” spoken English, using expressions like “wanna,” “gotta,” “gonna,” etc., she was just being “fake.”

These are interesting and sensitive challenges. When she recognized that there was “shame” involved in making changes to her accent, she felt a great sense of relief and freedom. And yet the general sense that absorbing the “music” of English to sound more like a native speaker could cause her to lose her identify was a different story.  This part was not about the intensity of shame, but more about the fear of losing a part of yourself, your roots.

So the question is “Do we really lose our identity when we choose, consciously or unconsciously, to incorporate the sounds of the vernacular of our adopted country?” Must identity be tied to accent or is identity something internal – something felt – a deep love of one’s native country,  native culture.

I would really love to hear from speakers of English as a Second Language on this.

Meanwhile, check out the Canadian Pronunciation Coach YouTube channel at One-Minute Words for the web series One-Minute Words and other videos on pronunciation.