what is the best way to get an American accent?
Search from various English teachers...
Answers · 9
6
1. There is no such thing. There are at least 15 American accents, and probably more. So you can aim for one of them but it will be quite different to others.
2. You don't want to. You want to have good pronunciation and to minimize your natural accent. However there is no benefit to sounding just like an American if you already have fluent language. If you have a genuine accent it will confuse you, because people would assume you have lived in the culture and know much more about everything than you do. Fluency and pronunciation will help you a lot, but pretending to be an American when you speak will only confuse people.
3
Robert is right. You need to work on pronouncing the words correctly, but you don't need to loose your natural accent. I see that sometimes people mistake one thing from the other.
2
I guess you could start here at this map and try to pick out "The American Accent" and work on it. As near as I can see there are at least 26 distinct groupings.
http://robertspage.com/dialects.html
I don't mean to conflate dialects and accents. I do know the difference. I'm just trying to illustrate the complexity of the matter.
And let's not forget the sub-dialects!
My point is that there is not an 'American accent' as another person correctly noted. My best advice is to work on accent reduction if that is your real problem. Good Luck
1
Hi Eman--Honestly, the BEST way is to go to the US or an American-speaking institution, workplace, etc., and immerse yourself in the language. That means listening and speaking only American English or a year or more. But, there are teachers who specialize in nothing but accent reduction. There may be some on italki, but you would have to search for them. All the best--Ilene--your America teacher from beautiful New Mexico!
0
All good comments!
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