Accent reduction programs are not exclusive to foreigners living in a new place. Many local residents have taken advantage of these types of programs to help them through college and securing a good job. For instance, jobs that require constant communication with buyers like those in sales will need to fix a heavy accent in [...]
American Accent Training and Why It Is Critical To Survival in the US American accent training is not a course that will transform you into a slang-speaking, lip-smacking American or a gentle southern gal who’ll swoon and gush over anything and everything that pleases her. American accent training is the best way to reduce your [...]
Learn the American Accent “Where are you from? Has this question ever been asked to you with wide-eyed doubt by a native-born and bred American? If so, then you have to know it is probably because you sound a little American but in a forced kind of way or you could be a mix of [...]
Why Learn to Speak English? Due to the world’s declining economy and increased globalization, individuals around the world are traveling to the U.S. for better opportunities. Although there are typically more economic opportunities in the U.S. (when compared to foreign countries), many problems may arise when someone steps into a foreign country, the greatest challenge [...]
Part 4 of the Common English Phrases series is in! Here, we show five more phrases/words that are commonly mispronounced and incorrectly said. As previously mentioned, this could be caused by auditory differentiation mistakes-meaning that our brains perceive sounds differently than our ears. No need to guess what is right anymore, you can now feel [...]
Part 2 of our “What To Say and Where To Say It” series is here! This article will explain the lexical (word) and phonological (sound) differences that occur throughout the United States. Joshua Katz, a North Carolina State University doctoral student in statistics, created over one hundred maps of these features. So far we have [...]
Part 3 of the Common English Phrases series is in! Here, we show five more phrases/words that are commonly mispronounced and incorrectly spoken. As previously mentioned, this could be caused by auditory differentiation mistakes-meaning that the brain perceives sounds differently than the ears. With the information gained from this article, you can now be rest [...]
A few months ago, we came out with an article exploring the phenomena of lexical (word) and phonological (sound) differences in the United States. Out of the 100 maps of these features, we only looked at two in depth. In this article, we’ll look at how learning what to say and where to say it, [...]
Common English Phrases Part 2 of our series is finally in! Learning Common English Phrases can help improve your knowledge of the English language. It goes a step beyond just learning English-applying the words to create a phrase with a whole new meaning. As mentioned in part 1 of the series, these Common English Phrases [...]
In A World...with Accent Reduction When you’re at the movie theater and the previews come on, what type of voice do you hear at the beginning of a movie trailer? Most likely it’s the deep voice of a man. The new movie coming out August 9, 2013, In A World, turns the tables on this [...]
African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a form of Standard American English (SAE). It is fascinating how different AAVE and SAE are by means of pronunciation/phonology, grammar, and vocabulary. Many people that use the AAVE form ‘code switch’ between AAVE and SAE, utilizing African American Vernacular English reduction. Code switching is a phenomenon that some [...]
Accent Reduction: Knowing the Idioms of the English Language-Part 16 For those seeking a better command of the English language and enhanced Accent Reduction, a good knowledge of the common English idioms is a must. The English language has acquired its idioms over hundreds of years and not many know the origin of these common [...]
Common English Phrases Part 1-Are you saying them correctly? So you have 'two heads ate better than one' and 'look on the bright-side' down, but are you really sure it's 'nip in the butt'? Or is it 'bud'? Time to put your mind at ease-we have the answer to your problems! In this new series, [...]
Accent Reduction used in Foreign Accent Syndrome Imagine: waking up one day after a traumatic event and having an entirely new voice-an accent to be exact. For some people, such as Kath Lockett, this is a reality. Kath, as shown here in the documentary series, “My Strange Brain”, has Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS). Most people [...]
American Dialect The long awaited dispute of what is the ‘right’ way to say a sweetened carbonated beverage is in, finally. Could it be soda, pop, or coke? And the answer,according to one graduate student's American dialect research is: All of the above! That is, depending on where you are in America-due to one's American [...]