Read This first CD 1 Track 1

Welcome to American Accent Training. This book and CD set is designed to get you started on your American accent. We’ll follow the book and go through the 13 lessons and all the exercises step by step. Everything is explained and a complete Answer Key may be found in the back of the text.

What Is Accent?

Accent is a combination of three main components: intonation (speech music), liaisons (word connections), and pronunciation (the spoken sounds of vowels, consonants,and combiantions).As you go along, you’ll notice that you’re being asked to look at accent in a different way. You’ll also realize that the grammar you studied before and this accent you’re studying now are completely different.

Part of the difference is that grammar and vocabulary are systematic and structured—the letter of the language. Accent, on the other hand, is free form, intuitive, and creative—more the spirit of the language. So, thinking of music , feeling, and flow, let your mouth relax into the American accent.



Can I Learn a New Accent?

Can a person actually learn a new accent? Many people feel that after a certain age, it’s just not possible. Can classical musicians play jazz? If they practice, of course they can! For your American accent, it’s just a matter of learning and practicing techniques this book and CD set will teach you. It is up to you to use them or not. How well you do depends mainly on how open and willing you are to sounding different from the way you have sounded all your life.

A very important thing you need to remember is that you can use your accent to say what you mean and how you mean it. Word stress conveys meaning through tone or feeling, which can be much more important than the actual words that you use. We’ll cober the expression of these feelings through intonation iin the first lesson.

You may have noticed that I talk fast and ofter run my words together. You’vve probaably heard enough “English-teacher English”—where … everything … is …pronounced without having to listen too carefully. That’s why on the CDs we’re going to talk just like the native speakers that we are, in a normal conversational tone.

Native speakers may often tell people who are leatning Enflish to “slow down” and to “speak clearly.” This is meant with the best of intentions, but it is exactly the opposite of what a student really needs to do. If you soeak fairly quickly and with strong intonation, you will be understood more easily. To illustrate the point, you will hear a Vietnamese student first trying to speak slowly and carefully and then repeating the same words quickly and with strong intonation. Studying, this exercise took her only about two minutes to practice, but the difference makes her sound as if she had been in America for many years.

? Please listen. You will hear the same woerds twice.
…
Hello, my name is Muoi.I’m taking American Accent Training.

Introduction



You may have to listen to this CD a couple of times to catch everything. To help you, every word on the CD is also written in the book. By seeing and hearing simultaneously, you’ll leatn to reconcile the differences between the appearance of English(spelling)and the sound of English(pronunciation and the orher aspects of accent).

The CD leaves a rather short pause for you to repeat into. The point of this is to get you responding quickly and without spending too much time thinking aabout your response.

Accent versus Pronunciation


Many people equate accent with pronunciation. I don’t feel this to be true at all. America is a big country, and while the pronunciation varies from the East Coast to the West Coast, from the southern to the northern states, two components that aaare uniquely American stay basically the same—the soeech music, or intonation, and the word connections or liaisons. Throughout this progranm, we will focus on them. In the latter part of the bool we will work on pronunciation concepts, such as Cat? Caught? Cut? and Betty Bought a Bit of Better Butter;we also will work out way through some og thedifficult sounds, such as TH, the American R, the L, N, and Z.


“Which Accent Is Correct?”

American Accent Training was created to help people “sound American” for lectures, interviews, teaching, business situations, and general daily communication. Although America has many regional pronunciation differences, the accent you will learn is that of standard American English as spoken and understood by the majority of educated native speakers in the United States. Don’t worry that you will sound slangy or too casual because you most definitely won’t. This is the way a professor lectures to a class, the way a national newscaster broadcasts, the way that is most comfortable and familiar to the majority of native speakers.


“Why Is My Accent So Bad?”

Learners can be seriously hampered by a negative outlook, so I’ll address this very inportant point early. First, your accent is not bad; it is nonstandard to the American eat. There is a joke that goes: What do you call a person who can speak three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person who can speak two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person who can only speak one language? American.

Every language is equally valid or good, so every accent is good. The average American, however, truly does have a hard time understanding a nonstandard accent. George Bernard Shaw said that the English and Americans are two people divided by the same language!

Some students learn to overpronounce English because they naturally want to say the word as it is written. Too often an English teacher may allow this, perhaps thingking that colloquial Amercan English is unsophisticated, unrefined, or even incorrect. Not so at all! Just as you don’t say the T in listen, the TT in better is pronounced D, bedder. Any other pronunciation will sound foreign, strange, wrong, or different to a native speaker.


Less Than It Appears ... More Than It Appears

As you will see in Exercise 1-21, Squeezed-Out Syllables, on page 18,some wrds appear to have three or more syllables, but all of them are not actually spoken. For example, business is not (bi/zi/ness), but rather(biz/ness).

Just when you get used to eliminating whole syllables from words,you’re going to come across other words that liik as if they have only one syllable, but really need to be said with as many as three! In addition, the inserted syllables are filled with letters that are not in the written word. I’ll give you two examples of this strange phenomenon. Pool lools like a nice, one-syllable word, but if you say it this way, at best, it will sound like pull, and at worst will be unintelligible to your listener. For clear comprehension, you need to say three syllables(pu/wuh/luh). Where did that W comefrom? It’s certainly not written down anywhere,but it is ther just as definitely as the P is there. The second example is a word like feel. If you say just the letters that you see, it will sound more like fill. You need to say(fee/yuh/luh).Is that really a Y? Yes. These mysterious semivowels are explained under Liaisons in Chapter 2. They can appeat either inside a word as you have seen, or between words as learn.


Language Is Fluent and Fluid

Just like your own language, conversational English has a very smooth, fluid sound. Imagine thaat you ate waling along a dry riverbed with your eyes closed. Every time you cone to a rocl, you trip over it, stop, continue, and trip over the next rock. This is how the average foreigner speaks English.It is slow, awkward, and even painful. Now imagine that you are a great river rushing through that samen riverbed—rocks are no problem, aare they? You just slide over and around them wothout ever vreaking yoursmooth flow. It is this feeling that I want you to capture in English.

Changing your old speech habits is very similar to changing from a stick shift to an automatic transmission. Yes, you continer to reach for the gearshift for a while and your foot still tries to find the clutch pedal, but this soon phases itself out. In the same way, you may still say “telephone call”(kohl) instead of (kahl) for a while, but this too will soon pass.

You will also have to think about your speech more than you do now. In the same way that you were very aware and self-conscious when you first learned to drive, you will eventually realx and deal with the various conponents simultaneously.

A new accent is an adventure. Be bold! Eazggerate wildy! You may worry that Americans will laugh at you for putting on an accent, but I guarantee you, they won’t even notice. They’ll just think that you’ve finally learned to “talk right.”Good luck with your new accent!