Chosen Voice

Has this ever happened to you:

You work hard to prepare for an important presentation in English. But when you rehearse in front of native speakers, some of them say they don't understand what you're saying. And now there is very little time before you have to deliver the talk -- maybe only a couple of weeks, or even less. Not enough time to take an entire accent modification course.

If you ever find yourself in this situation, don't panic. You are not alone!

If you have a prepared text, it is possible to correct your pronunciation quickly. You have to work hard during whatever time is left, but you can do it. I frequently help doctors who make presentations at international research conferences. They may have only a little time to learn to pronounce very difficult medical terminology in English, but we work hard together and they succeed.

I know one man who had only two weeks to record and submit a video to apply to a very competitive academic program. When he first recorded his video, native speakers said they simply couldn't understand what he was saying. He worked on his pronunciation for two weeks, and he was finally able to deliver his talk clearly and persuasively. He was accepted into the program.

If you know exactly what you have to say, you can improve your pronunciation in a fairly short time. So even if you have little time to prepare, don't despair. Get some help and work hard, and you can do it!

Learning a New Accent is Like Driving on the Other Side of the Road (but less dangerous)

When you learn a new accent, you learn new muscle habits: new ways of moving the tongue and jaw and lips, and even the muscles in the throat. But the new habits don't become automatic right away. Speaking with our first accent is automatic. Naturally, we want the new accent to feel effortless -- and it can. But we need to give the new accent a chance to get "rooted" in our muscle memory.

The first time I went to the UK, I thought that driving on the left side of the road should feel just like driving at home -- except "mirror image". But the first day of driving on the left was a nightmare. I hit a curb and burst a tire.

A good driver has an automatic "mental map" of the shape of the car. You "just know" how much space the car needs. It's like being a fluent speaker of a language: the mental processing is unconscious and automatic. When you drive on the other side, the steering wheel is on the "wrong" side of the car. Suddenly, everything that feels natural and easy is wrong. It's confusing and overwhelming. But I made one big attitude change that made everything better:

I stopped impatiently trying to *make* it feel automatic. I stopped looking for mental shortcuts. I opened up my mind to a new experience. I took in all the sensory details: how things looked, how the car felt, how I heard the passenger's voice from my left, everything.

Within a few days, I could feel that driving on the left was becoming automatic. Soon, it felt almost as easy as driving at home.

Learning a new accent is very similar. It will take more than a few days, but there's no danger that anyone will get killed -- or even that you'll burst a tire.

Often, a client finds exactly the right tongue position for the American accent and says something with good American pronunciation. And then they will suddenly look worried and say, "But I can't talk like this all the time!" Actually, they can -- but it will take more than 30 seconds of practice. It won't feel automatic *right away*.

There's a deeper parallel here. When we're impatient for things to feel easy and automatic, the brain turns to things it can do automatically: our old habits. When I accepted that driving on the left was simply going to feel very, very weird for a while, and that I needed to fully absorb the experience -- that was when my mind opened up and I began to learn how to drive on the left.

To learn a new skill so well that it becomes automatic, we need to step away from our well-known habits and fully experience something totally new. If we surrender to the unfamiliarity, and stop worrying about "When will it feel easy?" -- that's when we get on the road that really leads to things becoming easy.

It's been very satisfying to help a Japanese client learn to pronounce some tricky words correctly for an important speaking event. Probably most people don't need to know how to say "atrial fibrillation," but this gentleman needed it for a medical conference. By the end of the session, he was saying it perfectly.

Words with "pr" and "br" often present a challenge for people learning English -- words like "probably" and "appreciate." But it's totally possible to learn to say them correctly. The key is to understand that the mouth positions for 'p' and 'r' or 'b' and 'r' are blended together in a specific way. Some learners try to pronounce the 'p' or the 'b' and then the 'r' as two different mouth movements, but then it doesn't come out right. The correct way is to do the whole combination as one smooth movement.

I love it when a client says, "Oh, that is *much* easier than the way I was doing it before!" When you find out how the native speakers do it, it's almost always easier than what you thought.