Tutors / tips to change your English accent

I used an accent coach (https://www.dannybryckcoaching.com/accent-modification , who was excellent). Highly recommend this path--you need a human in the loop providing feedback. You will probably be able to get some improvement on your own, but it will be inefficient.

I'm a native English speaker, but I'm from Texas, and as a kid I tended to talk really fast and mumble: if you've ever seen the show King Of the Hill, I talked like Boomhauer.

I deliberately trained myself to speak with a neutral American accent - probably what you mean by a West Coast accent - by watching particular actors and practicing - in private - speaking like them. In particular, for me, it was John Malkovich, who has perfect diction and enunciation.

This was in my teens and it took a couple of years, but it paid off. Nobody can tell where I'm from now, though people mostly assume California. I still say "y'all" but I say it with no Texan drawl, which sounds a bit odd to people, I think.

Just find people who speak the way you want to speak and watch them, listen to them, try to repeat things they say until you've got the accent down. At first it'll seem embarrassing, even if you're alone, and you'll find yourself feeling like a pretentious poseur for a while, but eventually you won't. It'll just be how you speak English.

Not at all the same thing, but I was briefly capable of speaking enough Chinese to just barely make it around rural China for two weeks, and I attribute it to a tutor I had who was a musician and taught me to literally sing the tones.

What I observe about most native English speakers who try to learn a tonal language is that they don’t really do the tones, but it isn’t because they aren’t capable. It’s because it feels silly or wrong to sing when you’re supposed to be talking.

I’ve also noticed I have friends with, for example, an Italian accent who can mimic my English pronunciation pretty closely if they want to mock me.

I think many people are pretty good at mimicry, but they probably keep their accent because doing it differently feels like they are being someone else, or they just feel silly or wrong doing it.

So I guess I say, tutors are great. Also maybe just mess around with mimicking speakers you want to sound like and put aside whatever identity you have subconsciously tied to how you currently speak? Especially try not to think about how words are spelled. Just mimic the sounds.

Do you want an English accent, or a particular American accent?

Professional actors rely on "dialogue coaches". Have you ever viewed "The King's Speech"? That seems like a parallel experience.

I haven't deliberately picked up new English accents, but I've taken formal classes in Spanish, making conscious efforts to imitate the phonemes of native speakers.

I would say that consistency will count for a lot in choosing your dialogue coach. Every year I had a new teacher; the first was Mexican, the second was American, and the third was from Barcelona! So, I was faced with deciding which accent(s) to learn and how to distinguish them and how to avoid mixing them all together. So, identify your target culture, and articulate that to your prospective coach so that you're on the same page, and try not to change coaches once you've settled into a relationship.

So you'll soon find out that there is not one "West Coast American accent", although there may be fewer of those than British English has produced. Growing up, I learned how to communicate with Valley Girls, surfers, CEOs, computer geeks, vatos, Crips, Bloods, goths, rivet-heads, Christians, pagans... well, you get the picture!

And before anyone objects and says those aren't accents, "surprising a native speaker" will involve vocabulary, grammar and syntax as much as the phonemes and inflection. So the OP has a broad definition of "accent" in mind.

It depends on what you mean by "West Coast accent". Generally, the stereotypical Surfer Dude/Valley Girl accent is looked down upon in professional circles unless you live in Los Angeles or you're a Kardashian. If by "West Coast", you mean the relatively neutral accents of, say, Silicon Valley employees and CEOs, then you should look for American movies and shows featuring Brits imitating modern-day Americans (Christian Bale, Hugh Laurie, etc.) and compare those performances to the actors' original voices in order to get an idea of how they "translate" their accents. Cartoons are also helpful[1]. A British voice actress by the name of Theresa Gallagher does a nearly flawless "neutral" American accent as the mother of the titular character in The Amazing of Gumball.

An accent coach is certainly a good investment, but it helps to be specific about you're goals. Doing so will save you money in the long run. "Sounding native" depends on time, location, and association as much as it does on enunciation. You may know this already, but the West Coast is a big place. Just as the accents of most Englishman aren't solely split between the * Made in Chelsea* crowd and Sir Humphrey Appleby, there is no monolithic West Coast accent.

[1] Trivia: many cartoons are recorded and animated in and around Burbank

I tend to pick up the accent spoken around me (I'm not a native English speaker). Not quite sure to what extent it borders native speaker's accent, but it happens without any training.

On a separate note, if you feel you need to change your accent to fit in, perhaps the people you feel would appreciate hearing you speak in a different accent are not worth the effort of fitting in with?

There are some interesting search results for [accent training app]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=accent+training+app&atb=v279-1__&i...

I'm a native English speaker, but have modified my accent for teaching international students, to be better understood. I did it by interacting with small classes and individuals, and paying attention to their level of confusion/understanding. I had been explaining the same subject matter to native speakers for years, so could have a reasonable guess at whether confusion was caused by language or content.

I went through this process on my own. I grew up in India and my first language is Tamil which is very distant to the European languages. I now live in the midwest. I can't tell the differences between regional American accents except the very famous Bostonian "paak the car" but I've listed some tips on how I improved my pronunciation.

When I started doing stand up comedy 12 years ago I realized I needed to work on my accent[1].

Here are some tips,

Pronunciation of english sounds is influenced by your first language.

Understand phonetics.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/fohull/a_yea...

Follow the links to Pronunciation: Basics, prosody and phonetics on the page above and understand how sounds are made.

If you don't understand the mechanics of tongue position, lip shapes, where the sound originates (front of the mouth or back of the throat) then you may not be able make the right sound.

If you can spend money get expert help (speech therapist, though I haven't done this personally).

Practice. Speaking involves physical muscles so practice those muscles.

Record yourself and listen ( after a few days). Observe pronunciations that need to be fixed and repeat.

In time, the mechanics of tongue position, lip shapes etc., will become subconscious and you will not have to worry about this consciously and you will speak naturally.

1. Most recent stand up comedy performance. https://youtu.be/845a6wyO5h0

When I’ve been to the states, as a Brit the only regional accent I’ve regularly had problems understanding is west coast.

Accent coaches are great. I worked with one in the context of learning an Irish accent for theater in college.

You learn IPA as a tool for discussing sentences and get someone whose mouth you can watch closely without freaking them out and who will watch and understand your mouth position well and provide immediate feedback.

For some language transitions though you have to start out retraining your brain to hear sound distinctions before you can hope to produce them. The L-R distinction in English, for example, is particularly hard for Japanese speakers because they can't hear that there are two sounds.

It can also be very helpful to enlist a native speaker with the target accent who is a coworker. Basically give them permission to tell you after every conversation what you said that wasn't in the target accent.

As a Slavic language speaker, i used to pronounce "th" as "d" and simply focusing on this mistake made me feel like the accent improved greatly. I have also met a lot of people who roll their "r"s, so that's another easy fix.

1. Forget about the letter "R" and use "ah" instead. That's how they talk.

2. Squeeze your nose with your fingers and talk

3. Keep your chin up. Literally and figuratively

I am only half joking. Proper English is very the opposite of how I was taught to speak my native Bulgarian. I can do it well enough but still feels completely unnatural even after all these years. Especially weird because we were exposed to so much US English on TV while my teachers were doing the British one.

I'm currently studying West Coast American (Los Angeles specifically, so "Hollywood" accent) with a tutor I found on Preply. We're using a book called Mastering the American Accent by Lisa Mojsin, which comes with audio tracks. Getting feedback would be ideal (hence a tutor), but maybe you could use the book by yourself?

What's your native tongue ? Some variant of English or something else ?

If its a foreign language, depending which one, it could well be more hassle than its worth to try to get a "perfect" accent.

Whichever way, you should be prepared to invest a lot of time to it, especially if you are hoping to be able to fluently switch between accents. Its unlikely to be something you can master in a couple of weeks.

Write down a list of words that you do not pronounce as you want. Record yourself reading them out loud, listen back to it and try to say it better next time. You can also create some sentences from those words and read them.

Some good advice in here. One thing I'll add is: make sure you know which English words have weird spellings that are nothing like the pronunciation. (This is a lot of words!)

The huge mistake I hear non natives make all the time is to incorrectly pronounce things like they're spelled. Eg pronouncing the "b" in "debt" (it's actually pronounced just "det" in every dialect), or pronouncing "says" with the same vowel as "say" (it's actually more like "sez" in most accents.)

There are zillions of other examples - I can't give you a list of words to be aware of, but I'm sure that someone somewhere must have compiled a good list.

There are a few apps that help you with that. I’ve used “Real Accent” and it’s useful for practicing a new accent. There are some with live instruction now. They may be worth checking out.

To me accents are nice, diction is the one that is important to practice for clear conversation. One can be a native speaker and have a terrible diction though.

Where do you live? What's your first language?

The generic way to perfectly learn a local dialect of any language is to:

- live there, have local friends, coworkers etc

- get an accent coach

- check if there's a good linguist specializing in the transition from your native language/accent/dialect to the target one (for me there was this guy https://www.youtube.com/c/PhoneticFanatic who is excellent at explaining things in depth, but his channel might not be useful for others)

I don’t think accents are a problem per-se.

The thing is to speak clearly and don’t rush the words.

Try to enunciate each word slowly and carefully and first and you will not have a problem.

I love hearing accents. The diversity and genuineness of them are amazing and that’s what makes travel awesome.

I have a London accent, with a bit of Home Counties[1] thrown in. It's not an 'Eastenders' accent. What I would like is to transition to soft Scottish accent, as someday I expect to be living north of the Border, and the Scots really don't like the English[2] (in the main). It's an odd use case to be sure, but it's something I'd like to do nonetheless.

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[1] The 50-ish miles around Greater London.

[2] I don't really blame them to be honest.

You should start by learning the phonology of the English language and its main dialects (namely Standard British English and General American). You need to know the theory because if you try to rely on your perception it will fool you. You need to know what you have to pay attention to. For example, if your L1 is a Romance language you have to be aware that vowel length is important in English, and that diphthongs are a single phoneme. Things like these you'll never be able to figure out yourself, they need to be taught. Once you know the theory in and out, you have to get a lot of exposure to the accent that you're interested in. Lastly, you start to imitate what you hear. Bear in mind that it takes a lot of practice to get a foreign accent right.

Listening to a particular accent will get you comfortable with it. Too much tech youtube helped me with picking up an American accent

First of all: my admiration to anyone who really tries to do this.

Secondly: I sang for 10-15 years, quite often in German, Italian, French, Latin, and a few others. In the community opera I was in the chorus with, they always had a diction coach, so we didn't sound like a bunch of Americans ("tutti" isn't "tood-ee", it's "toot-tee"). I'm sure that to a native speaker, we still did, but at least the effect wasn't comical.

Lastly: a shout-out to native French speakers. Is it even common for an American to lose their American accent, especially one over the age of 35? I read somewhere about a class in Paris where the teacher had you speak while holding a pencil in your mouth (sideways); I forget what exactly that was supposed to drill into you.