how to improve my accent

[CountessMonteCristo]

i am fluent in english but i have an accent which sometimes causes people to go "umm pardon me", especially when i am on phone. is there any way i can speak without an accent or would i carry it around for ever

Practice, I'm afraid. Using a dictaphone (or the recording feature on your phone, if it has one) will help, so that you can hear what you sound like. It may be worth paying attention also to see if there are certain words or sounds that people have trouble with, and focus on that. If you can afford it, a speech therapist or vocal coach might be able to help too.

If it helps, I am a native English speaker but from abroad, and people still ask me to repeat myself :)

thanks nearly i thot after a year i wud have lost my accent a little but no such luck

Practice definitely helps! I am sometimes asked where I come from when people can't quite place my accent but I am toying with the idea of elocution lessons. Does anybody have any experience with this?
I'm not totally convinced, as it is not always the accent but also word choice and word order that marks me as a non-native speaker...

I think it's a combination of word choices as well as accent. My DH and I are from NZ. I have a kiwi chinese accent and DH pure kiwi. He gets asked to repeat on the phone despite being a native speaker (with brummie parents in fact). We do have some unusual choice of words, like eggplant, zucchini, capsicum etc.

Oh they usually guess we are either aussies, south Africans or kiwis.

Can you ask your friends to tell you what the most jarring or odd sounds/phrases you use are? Then if you can work on those so they sound less odd to a native speaker, the rest of the accent won't really matter.

I used to have a bizarre but mainly comprehensible German accent - apparently sounded like a Geordie doing an impression of the Queen - but after tutorials for a while with a chap from Berlin, I'm told I now just sound 'rather English' but have got rid of the wierdest sounds!

I'm Scottish - no-one understands me on the phone, lol.

I find it's not accents as such that are the issue, it's speed, if speech is nice and slow it can have a really strong accent and be understandable.