At Fluency Corp, we don’t just help clients who need to learn a second language. We also offer classes that focus specifically on accent reduction for clients who are already fluent in that language. Because we’ve worked with so many people who want
At Fluency Corp, we don’t just help clients who need to learn a second language. We also offer classes that focus specifically on accent reduction for clients who are already fluent in that language. Because we’ve worked with so many people who want to reduce a heavy accent, there’s a question we’ve heard a lot: Is it possible to totally get rid of your accent when speaking your second language? In this article, we want to address that question, plus some others that it brings up.
Why Do We Have Accents Anyway?
Even when you know how a word in your second language should be pronounced, you can still find it next to impossible to pronounce it that way yourself. So why is that? Well, it goes back to the fact that different languages don’t just have different words; they also have different sounds. For example, the language of Spanish has rolled r’s, but the language of English doesn’t. If you’re an English speaker who’s learning Spanish, you might have trouble reproducing that rolled r sound because your ear just isn’t used to it.
Is It Possible to Learn a Second Language and Not Have an Accent?
There’s good news and bad news here. First, the good news: Yes, it is. And now the bad news: You have to be really young to do so.
According to the book “Neuroscience. 2nd Edition,” when we’re very young babies, we can discriminate between all the sounds used in different languages. But by the time we’re 6 months old, we are paying more attention to the sounds in the language that the people around us speak. We can still learn a second language without an accent and with native proficiency until about age 8. But, after that, it gets a lot harder. We lose a lot of our aptitude in perceiving and reproducing sounds from other languages that don’t exist in our own language.
Why Do People Want to Lose Their Accents?
If you’ve never had to conduct your work or personal life exclusively in your second language, you might be wondering about this question. Accents are beautiful and intriguing, right? We don’t have to all sound the same, do we?
Those statements are both true. But they don’t represent the full truth about accents. An accent that native speakers have trouble understanding can hold you back from so much — including success at work and connection with others. I (Micah, Fluency Corp’s founder) can tell you that both from experiences at our company and in my personal life.
I remember well a call that Fluency Corp once g