What Did You Say? Accent Modification Tips From a Speech-Language Pathologist

Introduction

Hello! It’s Kristine here with the Express to Impress podcast. This episode is part two of, “Want an American English Accent?  Allyson Plumberg Debunks Accent Myths.” So, if you haven’t listened to the previous episode, I recommend you check it out before listening to this one. 

Can’t read now? Pin it for later!

As a reminder, Allyson Plumberg is the founder of Rooted Accents: Solutions for Accent Modification. She provides speech therapy services and accent modification coaching to students and professionals worldwide. 

And a quick reminder that you can subscribe to receive notifications whenever I release a new episode. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts and all other major podcast directories. If you want to receive an email with communication training and my latest podcast episodes, sign up for my newsletter on my website at express-to-impress.com. 

Alright, let’s jump back in, where you’ll be getting some accent modification tips from Allyson.

So I bet you’ve seen some pretty remarkable transformations in your experience helping people modify their accents. Could you share a success story with the listeners? Maybe you had a great learner with great success in accent modification? 

Accent Modification Success Stories

Allyson: 

Yes! So I have a lot of really wonderful success stories from clients, and one comes to mind. There’s a client I’m working with in Poland, and he’s raising his daughter with a bilingual lifestyle–Polish and English. Now his native language is Polish, but he’s very, very good and fluent in English. His Polish accent is quite strong when he’s speaking English, so we’ve been working on helping him read stories to her. She’s just a little. She’s only two years old, so she’s getting really good input from the beginning. We even got a little interruption from my client’s wife, who jumped in on the call and said she could really tell his accent was improving, and it’s just really affecting her whole family. 

Another story is about a client I have in Spain, and she actually met a former colleague of hers. And this colleague said,

“Hey, I can tell your English is sounding so good these days! What have you been doing?”

So people can tell the difference, and when my clients get a little encouragement like that, it means the world to me. I love that!

How to Make the “Th” Sound

Kristine: 

That’s awesome. Okay, so in each episode, I like to provide listeners with some tips that they can implement in their lives right away. And since many Express to Impress Podcast listeners are language learners, do you have any tips to share with them about modifying their accents? 

Allyson: 

Yes! So we’ve talked a lot about rhythm and stress and pitch today in rushing and slowing down, but we haven’t really talked about some of the things that people really like, and those are the speech sounds. So our consonant and vowel sounds. One sound that’s really tough for people to say, if English is not their native language, it’s the th sound. And that actually comes in two different forms. We get the voiceless “th,” and we also get the voiced “th.” 

Now this sound comes up a lot in English because some of our most high-frequency words like “the,” “that,” and “this”–those all have the voiced th sound. So, oftentimes we’ll hear people maybe make a substitution like a “duh” instead of “the” or maybe “zuh” instead of “the.” They’ll kind of use a D or a Z sound. You are much harder to understand if you’re making those substitutions because your listener is trying to figure out what word you mean to say. 

So one tip I like to give people with this sound is to make sure that the tip of your tongue is sticking out just a little bit–not too much–between your top and your bottom teeth. We don’t want you to look weird–that’s not good for your communication either, so just lightly stick it out between those top and bottom teeth. And think about lifting the tongue a little bit. Lift up, think up. You should be able to sustain a “th” sound. It should not be a burst of sound that comes all at once. So make sure that you’re getting that sustained sound and you’re keeping that tongue tip touching, especially the top teeth. 

So here’s a couple of practice words I’ll give you–these very high-frequency words, for example, the, that, this, those, there, and they. We use these words all the time in English, so you should get those right. You should be drilling those words so that people can understand you as best as possible. And some voiceless “th” words: Here are three for you that are kind of common: think, Thursday, and third.

Kristine:

Thank you, Allyson! That’s perfect. Yes, that’s a common challenge that many of my clients face–it’s that “th” sound.

Allyson:

Yeah, it’s tough.

Kristine:

Some of those words sound like different words if they don’t pronounce them with the th sound. And sometimes it leads to comedy. You know there’s something comical about the word that they said that they didn’t mean. So that’s always unwelcome. When you say a word you think you pronounced it right, but just because you pronounce one letter wrong or these two letters like “th” wrong, then suddenly it becomes another word, and people are laughing for the wrong reasons. 

Allyson: 

Yes, yes, it can be embarrassing. So that’s a really good point, Kristine. You’re right. You want to get these words right as much as possible to avoid embarrassment. 

Kristine:

But I love that you kind of prioritize the words because it is challenging when you think of all “th” words. But if you can start with the, that, this, those, there, they– they’re so common. We use them all the time, and if you can at least master those consistently, then that’s going to make a huge difference in how you communicate with other people. 

Allyson:

Yes, Absolutely. 

Accent Modification Online Resources

Kristine: 

Okay, any other tips for our listeners?

Allyson:

Well, I can give a couple of resources that are available for free online. All of these involve listening, and I always encourage people to practice by repeating what they hear. Just listening isn’t as good as going through the motor movements of getting your mouth and your tongue and everything to do it yourself. So make sure you’re practicing along with anything I suggest. 

TED Talks are fantastic. You also learn some really interesting ideas, and they’re really, really great. If you go to the TED.com website, you can get the transcripts of these talks, and you can click on a sentence. It will take you right to the point in that talk where the speaker is saying that sentence. So, a really great opportunity for some repetitive practice. There are tons of General American English accent speakers on TED Talks. So, go there, check that out. 

There’s also a really fun website called YouGlish, which basically takes all these YouTube videos and sorts through them when you type in a single target word that you want to practice saying, and you want to hear many, many different people saying it from a target accent. So, I might put in the word “native.” This YouGlish website pulls up all these wonderful YouTube videos of different speakers, and you can just select which accent you want to hear from, so I select the American accent. And I even use it all the time for research. It’s a great tool.

Kristine:

I love YouGlish. I also highly recommend it. 

Allyson:

Oh, cool, good. Yeah, it’s wonderful. It’s a Wonderful tool. Pronuncian.com is also a very great drill kind of based tool. If you know that there are a couple of sounds that are really hard for you–maybe you’ve heard it from a friend or who heard it from a teacher or a professional–you can do drills based on those particular sounds, so vowels and consonants. There are lots of good audio files there that you can use. 

So let me just make a quick mention about practice in general. It’s much, much, much better to practice short bursts frequently. Do not save it all for Sunday afternoon where you’re going to spend two and a half hours practicing your English. I just don’t see the same kind of returns on time invested when you practice that way. Your brain has been speaking English a really definitive way for a long time (for probably most of the people listening to this podcast). You are going to need to break some patterns. And the best way that you are going to do that is by consistent, frequent practice. So try to do it every day. 10 to 15 minutes is great. A lot of people think, “oh, an hour a day.” You know that’s great too, but 10 to 15 minutes every day.

Kristine:

Awesome, and I’m going to make a short plug here for one of my previous episodes, “Introducing the Shadowing Technique for Language Learning.” That technique can go along with a TED Talk; for example, where you are listening to the Ted Talk, you’re pausing it, you’re repeating what you hear. I’m a big fan of the shadowing technique because, as you said, it gets you talking, so you’re not just listening, you’re using your mouth. You’re getting that practice.

Allyson:

That sounds great! I’m going to check out that episode!

Accent Modification Coaching

Kristine:

Nice! Alright, any final tips?

Allyson: 

Well, as far as getting feedback and practicing your English and practicing your accent, there is a lot of benefit to getting feedback from a native speaker or professional who’s trained in accents or dialects or maybe even just an English language learning coach. There’s only so much that you guaranteed on your own.

If you’re not very good at hearing differences between vowel sounds or you’re not really sure what vowel sound you’re correctly producing or incorrectly producing, getting feedback from someone who is a native speaker of that accent is so important. It eliminates the guesswork for you for one, and it helps you move forward with confidence that you’re doing the right thing for that accent.

Remember accents are not right or wrong–sometimes they’re going to lead to better communication in some circumstances than others. So we always just encourage you to get some feedback as much as possible. You get to also hear their input alongside yours. So, if there’s a particularly difficult concept, then they get to say it, and you get to hear it right then and there, and you’re getting that feedback immediately in that practice, and you’re going to change your habits that way more quickly. 

Accent coaches and dialect coaches like what I do in accent modification; honestly, we’re trained to anticipate the problems you’re going to have before you even show up in our classroom. Because if you know what language you already speak, we can anticipate some of the common difficulties with the American English accent if you come from say, a Mandarin-speaking background or an Italian-speaking background. So we know exactly what to anticipate, and we also know how to listen very carefully and efficiently to help point you in the right direction and give you the skills and the drills to help you get those new sounds and new concepts under your belt quickly.

Tune in Next Week

Kristine:

Awesome! Thank you, Allyson. This has been enlightening. I’ve learned so much from you today. I want to thank you for joining me to share your knowledge with the Express to Impress listeners. And I know you are in big demand, and you have limited availability, but how can listeners find your website and get in touch with you about accent modification coaching? 

Allison: 

You can find me at my website, which is www.rootedaccents.com, and I’ll over pronounce that just for the sake of clarity. It’s rootedaccents.com. And you can also shoot me an email at allyson@rootedaccents.com. My website is a great place to learn about me, and you are able to book a private one-on-one session with me right there and then if you would like to do that.

Kristine:

And Allyson, since there are different spellings for the name Allyson, could you spell that for our listeners?

Allyson:

Oh absolutely. It’s A-l-l-y-s-o-n. allyson@rootedaccents.com. 

Kristine:

Wonderful. Thank you so much again, Allyson! And to the listeners, I invite you to tune in next time to improve your English skills. You’ll learn definitions for phrases and idioms.

Thank you so much for listening, and if you found this episode useful, please remember to share it with a friend! See you next time. Bye!