Hello my fellow foreigners! 😉

Another year has come to an end, and I have to tell you that there’s so much gone on this year here on AccentAdventure.com!

• In the beginning of the year I realized I have to focus on my American and British accent so I ditched any attempts to learn other accents – Irish, Australian or Scottish. Why? I simply realized there’s so much to learn in terms of these 2 main types of English pronunciation, that I’d rather choose to become almost perfect at the two instead of jumping from one to other while never truly mastering any accent!
• I did a month’s long mission on learning American Phraseology and published all those videos between this blog and my EasyIdioms.com blog;
• I started working on the Accent Genie program and finally launched it to my audience later on this year;
• And I never stopped publishing articles and videos on this blog for you to enjoy!

And now I’d like to take this opportunity to THANK YOU MY DEAR CUSTOMERS AND BLOG VISITORS ❗

I really appreciate you staying with me throughout the year 2013, and I hope you’ll stay with me for another year, and I also hope you’ll learn a thing or two about the American or British accent from me as well!

Have a good one! 😉

Have you ever done search on YouTube for “American accent” and watched a few of those videos?

If you haven’t – well, go ahead and watch a few of those. If you haven’t – well, I’m pretty sure you’ll have to agree with me on one thing:

The vast majority of American accent videos on YouTube are recorded by a native speaker (typically a British English speaker) trying to READ by putting on the American accent or just pronounce INDIVIDUAL words or SLANG phrases.

And that, my friends, is something I have a slight problem with ❗

How so?

Simple enough!

You see – I’m a foreign English speaker myself YET when I’m recording American accent videos just like the one on top of this article, I’m doing my best to SPEAK FLUENTLY with the American accent about some topic.

I’m not reading.

I’m not just pronouncing individual words.

And I’m not just using some cliché slang expressions to showcase my American pronunciation.

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Guess how long it took me to feel a noticeable improvement to my American pronunciation?

A few weeks at least ❗

I started my American Accent Learning Mission on July 4 last year (Independence Day, what a coincidence, isn’t it?) and it wasn’t until a few weeks into the mission that I could feel my speech transform and become more and more American-like.

Up until then, however – hard work and long hours of speech practicing with little progress made; at times it even felt I’d lost any ability to resemble an American whatsoever…

Basically the point I’m making here in this video is a very simple and straightforward one:

If you decide to improve your English pronunciation and reduce your foreign accent, you can’t possibly expect super-fast results within a matter of a few days!

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Hello my friends American English fanatics! 😀

Do you want to find out what VERY SIMPLE sounds you can start using in your English conversations in order to sound more American?

Then watch the video above where I’m discussing the use of the word AND and the filler sound UM as well as the combination of both – AND UM…

Some people will say I’m promoting wrong speech practices here, but the simple fact of the matter is that:

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Howdy ho!

Are you a non-native English speaker?

I am too! 😀

Do you aspire to sound like an American English speaker?

If you do, then we’ve clearly got something in common because I’ve been learning the General American Pronunciation with good results for more than a year now, and you may definitely want to check out the video above where I’m doing an accent learning lesson from the Accent Genie Program which is a pretty unique foreign accent reduction video course aimed at foreigners just like YOU ❗

So, without a further ado, let’s just watch the video and if you have any questions thereafter, please don’t hesitate to post them in the comments section below.

And by the way – I have an extensive Accent Genie Frequently Asked Questions section HERE so you may want to check it out first to see if you can find the answer to your question there.

Thanks for tuning in,

Robby 😉

If you’re a non-native English speaker (I prefer the term “foreign English speaker” much better) desperately wanting to reduce your foreign accent, then one of the things you’re most likely engaged in is watching various English teachers on YouTube and heeding to their advice on how to acquire authentic American or British accent.

It’s all nice and well, however, having watched countless of English pronunciation improving videos myself, I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of teachers are missing a crucial part of the whole foreign accent reduction thing, namely – FOCUS on the right things.

There’s a gazillion pieces of information one can acquire in relation to pronunciation, and you may think the more, the better. On top of that, all those teachers won’t hesitate to share all their accent acquisition secrets amassed over a good number of years spent on in-depth studies of English pronunciation in a bid to sound super-smart and super-professional.

More often than not, my friend, LESS is more! 😉

You can spend a lot of time trying to analyze American English sentences, for example, and making sure you fully understand every little detail before you even attempt to replicate what you hear, but in a weird twisted way the very fact that you’re focusing on EVERY SINGLE sound makes it very hard to speak with proper American or British pronunciation!

Let’s take, for example, this simple English word – PRONUNCIATION.

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Just because I’m running this website where I’m keeping a track record of how I improve over time when speaking with various English accents doesn’t mean I hadn’t been working on my English pronunciation before.

I had, and while my foreign accent didn’t bother me too much, I would still make a certain amount of effort to pronounce English sounds the way native English speakers do.

And guess what?

The strangest thing would sometimes happen when I was trying really hard to speak with as good pronunciation as I could possibly manage:

I would sometimes completely lose the thread of my thoughts, and my speech would grind to a halt!

I was none the wiser at the time as to why it was happening to me, but now that I’ve spent a good few years sorting out my English fluency issues and also working on my English pronunciation, I know for a fact that trying to do anything TOO HARD is detrimental to my ability to speak in English fluently and maintain a consistent flow of your thoughts as I speak.

When I’m forcing myself to say things super-correctly when I speak in English, quite the opposite happens and I actually start making stupid grammar mistakes.

When I’m trying really hard to sound smart and use just the right English phrases, the wrong words start coming out of my mouth by themselves.

And when I’m trying to speak with a super-correct English pronunciation, my ability to speak fluently also takes a hit:

• Words start blurring together;
• I forget what I was actually trying to say;
• I start hesitating and stuttering like a beginner English student!

Now, is this a unique issue?

Am I the only one experiencing it on the whole wide world?

I suspect it’s not really the case as there are millions upon millions of foreign English speakers out there trying hard to sound like native English speakers in terms of their pronunciation, and there’s a good chance that you’re also experiencing these kinds of problems every now and then ❗

Would you like to know why it’s happening to your English speech?

Would you like to know how to deal with it?

Then keep reading on my friend! 😉

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Today I went to a computer hardware shop with my wife to buy a birthday gift for my 8 year old cousin’s daughter.

We went in, and I walked straight up to the 3 shop assistants standing in the middle of the showroom having a chat, and I asked them if they had MP3 players in stock.

When I asked the initial question, I spoke with the American accent – simply because I’ve been doing a lot of American pronunciation practice lately and my “standard accent” (it’s my way of describing a non-native English speaker’s accent when they don’t pay particular attention to the way they speak) has changed over time.

I mean – there was a time in the early stages of my General American Pronunciation learning mission when I didn’t sound anything like an American outside my practice sessions. Now that I’ve spent almost a year and a half on learning the American pronunciation, the American accent has become my second nature, and it shows when I speak with the locals here in Ireland while going about my daily business.

Now, going back to my experiences in the hardware shop – as I was looking at the MP3 players and listening to what the shop assistant was telling me, I started getting an impression that I was being treated with slight contempt. The way I saw it, I wasn’t asking for an expensive, fancy gadget like iPod or iPhone, so the shop assistant in question wasn’t really that interested in treating me like a VIP.

Well, not that I needed some VIP treatment anyway – it’s just that it would be nice not to be judged by what you’re buying, isn’t that right?

So, needless to say, I found myself winding up during the conversation and eventually I was quite annoyed with the shop assistant.

The worst comment came in the very end when I and my wife spotted some cute earphones and I asked the shop assistant if these ones could be plugged into the MP3 player we’d been looking at. Guess what her response was? “Well… Yes, they’re for listening to music!” Basically the underlying message was – “You moron, don’t you know what earphones are meant for? Of course they can be plugged into an MP3 player!”

I guess I don’t have to tell you how pissed off I was! 😡

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I’d always held to a view that it takes a long, long time to develop a foreigner’s English pronunciation to a degree where one’s foreign accent has almost disappeared and others might actually mistake that person for a native English speaker.

In all honesty, I believed it almost impossible unless one had moved to an English speaking country at a very young age OR some very expensive accent reduction classes are attended which would set you back by a couple of thousand bucks at least!

Ever since I’ve been running this blog, however, I’ve come to realize that fast accent reduction isn’t something that only Hollywood actors or highly paid professionals can avail of. In fact, I strongly believe that ANY FOREIGNER can pull it off in a relatively short period of time – provided, of course, that the right English pronunciation improvement strategies are put into practice!

But what does it take to improve your English pronunciation FAST?

And how does it compare to more profound, more extensive accent reduction routine that might take you a couple of years – if not more?

A very valid concern one might have is – will QUICK accent improvement results last forever or is it going to be just a quick-fix solution instead of giving you a permanent, lasting native-like American or British accent?

Well, you’re more than welcome to read the rest of this article then were I’ve compared the two ways of improving your English pronunciation – the FAST approach and the more profound, more extensive English pronunciation studies that will be spread out over a longer period of time!

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