Expert Advice on Accent Reduction from Paddy Kennedy - North American English 

The secrets of accent reduction

1. Your accent is not the problem.

They've been told for years, 'Could you please speak more slowly because I can't understand your accent' and then I come along and I say, 'But guess what?  people, you accent isn't your problem.' Let's take Jackie Chan. As soon as that man opens his mouth, you hear his mother tongue and yet we understand him all the time and he makes tons of money performing in American movies. 

2. Language has rhythm: 

Which takes us to the second point, the whole thing in accent reduction is to hear the music in the language because it isn't your accent that's the problem. It's that you're trying to speak my language in the rhythm pattern of your language and I can't understand you. English is a beat-driven language. Everything we say can be drummed out. You've got to train your ear to hear the different musical notes as well as how it beats the rhythms. Practice this way and in no time you'll be speaking in the same kind of melody as does Jackie Chan. 

3. We speak in 'sound units'

The third point, particularly in English and particularly in North American English, we do not speak one word at a time. No. We speak in sound units. Where's Bob? Bob is on the phone. We don't ever speak word by word so I always say to accent reduction clients. 'Everything that you have learned so far about the English language you have learned with your eyes through textbooks. But when you're learning to speak the language, get rid of all of that. Because you don't want to see, you don't want to read, you want to hear. Because you see and read one word as a time, but we don't speak that way.' 

The only way you can develop an ear is to listen to the way in which native speakers of any language are speaking and begin to imitate. One thing that people can do right now is stop and start this video as you're listening to it and imitate everything I'm saying. Because I'm speaking in standard North American rhythm patterns. Practice the music and when you feel you've mastered that go on to the next little phrase. When you imitate me, exaggerate it. Make the sounds big because you want to train the organs of articulation we call them. You want to train the tongue, the cheeks, the lips, the whole mouth how to help you make these sound units. So exaggerate. Tongue twisters, you can find tongue twisters everywhere on the Internet. And when you say these tongue twisters, say them as if they mean something. Say, 'She sells sea shells by the sea shore.' And say it with rhythm. It's more important that you have the up and down of the language than it is saying it quickly. The most important thing is just keep practicing. That's how we learned our mother tongue. Our mother held us, we heard her. And as we got old enough and after we had heard her and after we had developed the organs of articulation we began to imitate our mother. So there's no shortcut. There's no 'speak like a native speaker in 28 days' and if someone tries to sell you that package it won't work. But mark my words, as soon as you start to practice these rhythms, you will begin to notice your accent is diminishing. 

(practice can be a verb in American English

practise is the verb form of practice/noun in British English )

====================================================

Tips for Chinese Speakers Learning British English by Helen Love

English Accent Reduction and Elocution by ExpertAccent / cardiff-speech-and-drama

Today we're going to look at the needs of Chinese speakers learning English. There are a number of problems that Chinese speakers have when they're learning English that come from the structure of pronunciation of their native language. In Chinese, syllables don't end with a consonant, so Chinese speakers frequently leave the end of a word or even the middle of a word. So they won't put the final sound out if that is a consonant. It does mean that it's quite difficult to understand what's being said.

The other thing is the vowel tends to be quite short and the words spark out one at a time rather than being drawn out and joining together and giving some tone. There is also a difficulty in digraph sounds that is vowels that are two sounds 'stuck together' like au, ai, ou

For Chinese speakers working on accent softening(When I work with Chinese speakers who are improving their English pronunciation ),  these are the areas which we generally have to begin with/start to look at. So to give you an example, we might want to say a sentence like 'it's very nice to meet you'. We would say not 'it's nice to meet you' which often how it comes out for a Chinese speaker. We look at the ending of the word, drawing the vowel out and stretch the important words. 'It's very nice to meet you.' There are of course many ways of saying it right as well as many ways of saying it wrong.  Sometimes Chinese speakers of English are very upset because they can come across as being quite abruptly and unfriendly, but of course they don't want to be at all. The manner of delivering of the speech make you seem like that. It's my aim when I work with speakers from whichever native languages to make you sound clear, confident, pleasant and approachable. And if you want to get in contact, book a skype session we can start straight away.