This is a very common question I hear from immigrants and overseas workers as we discuss their coaching options.\u00a0 Though everyone’s case is unique, here is my general advice:<\/p>\n
If your (heavy<\/i>) accent is stopping you from being confident, from making friends and\/or from making (more<\/i>) money, then YES.\u00a0 Do some accent reduction for your own peace of mind and to become a more confident speaker.<\/p>\n
If your accent does not interfere with daily communications, and people are not constantly asking you to repeat yourself or say it again in a different way, then you are probably okay.\u00a0 You still may choose to modify your accent anyway, but at least you should know that it is not a pressing issue that will halt your career.<\/p>\n
How can you modify and reduce your accent?
\n1.\u00a0 Watch English movies and TV.\u00a0 Rent DVDs of shows and sit-coms and play them over and over again, with and without English subtitles.
\n2.\u00a0 Listen to the radio and\/or sing English songs.\u00a0 Look up the lyrics online.
\n3.\u00a0 Meet native English speakers and practice.
\n4.\u00a0 Buy a good pronunciation book, preferably with audio CDs, MP3s, podcast etc.\u00a0 Choose carefully BrE or AmE.
\n5.\u00a0 Attend Toast Masters or another public speaking practice forum.
\n6.\u00a0 Attend an ESL class that focuses on pronunciation or lots of speaking practice.
\n7.\u00a0 Hire an ESL tutor who has experience teaching the above, or whose voice you want to imitate.\u00a0 Don’t be shy to ask for details of experience, materials used, references etc.
\n8.\u00a0 Hire a professional Communication Coach with a solid background in ESL and accent reduction.
\n9.\u00a0 Hire a professional linguist or speech pathologist.
\n10.\u00a0 Practice practice practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a very common question I hear from immigrants and overseas workers as we discuss their coaching options.\u00a0 Though everyone’s case is unique, here is my general advice: If your (heavy) accent is stopping you from being confident, from making friends and\/or from making (more) money, then YES.\u00a0 Do some accent reduction for your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[538,535,537],"tags":[617,618,567],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-confidence","category-esl-cultural-communications","category-speak-english-better","tag-accent-reduction","tag-pronunciation","tag-public-speaking"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":722,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions\/722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}