How to Improve Your Accent in a Language

If someone were to ask me what I thought were one of the most important elements that demonstrated a level of mastery in another language, I would say that accurate and authentic pronunciation were key to becoming fluent. Even though I am nowhere near perfect, as no one is, I have always had an ear for having what many would say is a “good”, or a “native-sounding” pronunciation. I have already been mistaken for a native French speaker and have been told that my German accent is good by students who have already studied abroad in Germany and by other native German speakers. This ability, just like anything else, did not just happen overnight. I can still clearly remember stumbling across words that were unfamiliar and trying to force myself to produce German sounds by being my American-self and by trying to transfer that over to a language whose pronunciation was nothing like that of English.

This is where I went wrong. I truly believe that anyone, including immigrant parents, adults, and teenagers who have never been exposed to a language other than their native languages can eventually sound like a native speaker in a foreign language. My hope for this post is not to try to denounce accents, or to say that you must sound a hundred percent authentic, but I do hope that you can gain some words of wisdom from someone who has had years of experience trying to find the best methods to completely get rid of, or to improve on your accent.

My first tip is to try to speak as early as you can. Even if you only know a few basic phrases, or have an elementary-level vocabulary, there are no real excuses to not start using your language as frequently as possible. I would recommend talking to yourself, finding language partners online, talking to your friends, your classmates, or your family-members, and to get as much exposure to authentic listening material as you can find. If you have been keeping up with my blog posts, you will know how strong of a proponent I am of YouTube. It is just like Google, in the sense that there are hundreds of thousands of videos dedicated to learning another language, or, what I almost solely do, listen to YouTubers who are from a country of your target language. (Feel free to read my post “How to Improve Speaking a Language” and “Listen to YouTubers in Your Target Language” if you want to know how to improve on those skills).

I also recommend reading passages out loud as many times as you feel necessary on a regular basis, so that you get used to making new sounds with your throat, with your mouth, and with your tongue. Remember that you should not try to make sounds using the same parts of your mouth as you would with your target language. Instead, you have to slowly train yourself to start using different parts of your mouth in order to make them without even thinking about it. The more practice that you get, the less you will have to have stop and think about where your tongue should be placed in order to make a particular sound. In other words, the more audio, reading, and speaking exposure that you get, the more likely it will be that you will start to familiarize yourself with how words should be pronounced.

Lastly, it is very important to ask advanced language learners, especially native speakers, if you can have conversational practice with them. If you do so, you can ask them to correct your pronunciation, or words that you are not saying correctly. You should not be corrected after every mistake, especially if you are a beginner, or feel that you need a lot of speaking practice in order to become proficient; however, you should take any criticism to heart and work on your weak spots. If, for example, you had trouble pronouncing words with accents, you could practice saying those words out loud based on what you thought were their correct pronunciation. After a lot of repetition, the extra exposure will help make you confident when speaking without worrying about sounding “very (too) American”, or “not very good.”

I hope that you found this post helpful. I figured that I would give you tips about how to start taking your language skills to the next level, as I feel that perfecting my pronunciation has helped me gain more confidence and become closer to reaching fluency in several languages.