To ask how to improve my accent and pronunciation when learning a new language

[WellAlwaysHaveParis]

I’m really curious about this, so I’m mostly posting for traffic if that’s okay

I’d be interested to hear if anyone on here is learning a new language, and if you’ve done anything in particular to work on your accent and pronunciation in the new language.

I learned French and Spanish at school, but have kept up with French and studied it much more in-depth than Spanish. I studied it at university and have lived in France, and since then, I’m really keen to keep using it.

So far, in terms of spoken French, I’ve tried to improve my French accent by listening to lots of different things (music, the news, TV series etc.) fairly regularly and by trying to speak French regularly.

I’d be really interested to know if there are other things I can do to improve my accent and pronunciation.

What’s worked for you, if you’ve ever been in a similar situation (especially if you’ve learned French)? Are there any methods that you use? Or is it most important to try and speak it as much as possible?

Thanks :)

I'm in a similar situation with English (second language) but also French (third language), etc. But what I've noticed is that it's not so much the pronunciation as the vocabulary that's important, it's more important to have a varied vocabulary than having a "perfect" pronunciation, which is probably not possible if learning the language as an adult. That said, one might try to avoid the strongest accents. Do you record yourself regularly and post videos? I don't, but someone who does is YouTube user LingoSteve who has managed to learn a great many languages, my mother tongue included and he has nearly a perfect accent. He probably already has a video on tips and tricks how to work on accent or pronunciation, or if not, a great many interesting videos anyway so it might be worth checking out.

Oh, one more thing. I hang out on Mumsnet. You could hang out on a similar forum in French if you can find one.

My accent only improved when I moved to France...

13 years later and I'm totally fluent and my accent has improved amazingly but I still have a slight English accent. It's never going to go away - I don't have the ear for it.

Luckily people here tell me it's charming and that I shouldn't try to get rid of it.

Fortunately my D.C. speak French and English with proper accents.

Do you speak to many French people? I found copying them helped. And my DS is learning to read and I've picked up a few tips from that!

Oh, and one MORE thing. Do you have contacts in France, like penfriends, even though people surely have those on Facebook these days? All the things you've mentioned are sort of passive, not being in contact with actual people who has French as their mother tongue. I don't in English and that's probably one reason for not making any progress whatsoever in English (this is written from abroad while totally immersed in my mother tongue, I'm by the way listening to a radio program in my language right now while writing this in English, doing two things at once).

I've been learning Spanish since I was eleven - so, eleven to eighteen in primary and secondary school, and then four years of university Spanish. The rest of the time (I'm currently 33) I've been teaching myself, in the sense that I watch telenovelas and seek out Spanish music and other things like that.

I was incredibly lucky in one job I had that I made an Argentinean friend. He was a direct supervisor for me, and I often had to report... well, customer malfeasance, shall we say, to him. I had enough Spanish to be able to do that crudely, and he helped me brush up and polish to the point where we could chat away quite cheerfully to each other in Spanish, and make it look like we were just shooting the breeze, whereas in actuality I was informing him that the player on the end of the table had just cheated, etc!

I thought for a very long time that my Spanish had plateaued and that I was never going to get any better, but then I discovered an app which has made all the difference. Have you tried Speaky? It matches native speakers of a language, with people who are trying to learn it. Three weeks, I've been using it, and my Spanish has improved more in those three weeks than it has in probably the last ten years of trying to teach myself.

The thing I think has helped the most has been actually speaking to native speakers? So in essence, yes, speaking as much as possible has been the best thing I've done.

I'll tell you what I tell my kids though (I teach languages in a primary school): "If you know the word, use the word - and then you'll never lose the word!" Trite, but effective! :)

I learned English pronunciation by reading books out aloud at the same time as listening to BBC World, watching all films in English and - most importantly - finding excuses to talk to natives whenever possible. Very few people now pick up that I have an accent at all and of those that do, none would place me in a non-English-speaking country.

Don't "watch" movies. Study with them. So have the remote and pause after every sentence to repeat it. Almost forget the words and go with the sounds and intonations (like you were learning a song). Your ears should be linking to your vocal chords. When you hear a difference, stop and play with your mouth, tongue positon etc. And record yourself in that process too. Also watch the actors' mouths. Look where they're forming the words (towards the front for French). Imitate how the lips move.

None of this looks good while you're doing it, so just play. It's not going to work straight off. But your mouth/throat muscles are trained for English, they need to learn how to do a different workout.

But I agree with the poster above who mentioned a varied vocabulary. Unless your accent is SO bad that nobody can understand you, a really rich vocabulary will be more useful. The accent is like putting on a pretty dress. ;)

It's funny because I have Russian Italian and French friends. They always say we are obsessed with accents when we learn a language whereas they focus on pronouncing the words but not trying to sound British in any way