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Public Speaking Tips for Non Native Speakers

I often find that the strategies that I teach my accent reduction coaching clients are the same strategies that are used in public speaking. For both accent reduction and effective public speaking you need to: Warm up your voice ✔ Prepare your material with marks for emphasis, pauses & stops (breathing) ✔ Rehearse what you

American English~The Sounds of the Letter G

This week, one of my Skype accent reduction coaching clients was a bit surprised to realize that when the letter G occurs at the beginning of a word, it can have a soft sound or a hard sound. Hard G /g/ Soft G /ʤ/ He asked me if there were rules for the American pronunciation of

The Energetic Voice

This week’s Wall Street Journal featured two excellent articles on the voice. These articles cited recent research on what makes a voice sound powerful, influential and authentic. According to research analyst Carrie Goldberger~ An energetic voice comes across to listeners as authentic, inspiring trust.. And vocal energy is easily controlled by the speaker, providing ambitious

Twitter Language Map of NYC

Here’s something interesting…..especially if you use Twitter. ✔ The top six foreign languages spoken in New York are: Spanish Chinese Russian Korean Italian French Creole But this very cool Twitter Language Map of NYC doesn’t reflect that! Take a look at this color coded map to see which language group is Twittering the most. Maybe it’s

Speaking Business English in Japan

In the Harvard Business Review, Tsedal Neeley describes how many global businesses including Tokyo’s online retail giant Rakuten are mandating that all employees learn to speak English. This is a huge task and it involves a great deal of training.☝ As you can imagine, not all Japanese workers are excited about this. You can read the

How Americans Listen

Last month’s New York Times had a fascinating article titled: Smoothing the Path From Foreign Lips to American Ears. The article describes the American English pronunciation training of international graduate students teaching in the US. There is a huge need for this type of training. In their training sessions graduate students “take sentences apart to learn rhythm, emphasis, pauses

When an Accent Gets in the Way of a Job

In this week’s Wall Street Journal there was an interesting article titled, When an Accent Gets in the Way of a Job. The article asks the question, “What does an accent mean for success in the workplace?” In short, the answer is that we are often biased against accents that are difficult to understand. People

Lengthen Your Vowels!

I always tell my accent reduction clients that one way to speak more clearly and sound more American is to lengthen your vowel sounds. Why do you need to do that? Well…in spoken North American English every word has one vowel sound that is stressed. Stressed vowel sounds are said a bit louder and a

How to speak English more fluently

Most of the people who contact me for accent reduction coaching want to speak English more fluently. ♬ They want to sound and feel more natural when they are speaking American English. Learning to speak English with a fluent and natural sound involves many skills including sounds, stress, intonation and linking. Click here to see

American English Intonation Patterns

Perhaps you have heard people say that intonation is the melody or the music ♬ of spoken American English. Spoken English sounds melodic because English speakers use different types of intonation or pitch patterns when saying phrases and sentences. These intonation patterns are extremely important to use because they convey meaning. ✔ If you are