Do you ever wonder why your accent is so difficult for Americans to understand?

The people who I work with every week in my accent reduction coaching program know that their colleagues don’t always understand them.

But they don’t know exactly WHY their spoken English is difficult for others to understand.

Here is something that I tell my clients~

One HUGE contributor to your “foreign accent” is the way you use (or DON’T use) stress in words and sentences.

Let me explain what I mean by STRESS…..

Native speakers alternate between using stressed & unstressed words in phrases and sentences. They do NOT pronounce every word with the same emphasis.

For example, in the sentence below:

Hi SUSAN, how ARE you TODAY? ⤵

the pattern is….

reduceSTRESS,reduceSTRESSreduceSTRESS⤵

Learning to use stress correctly in a key SKILL that you must apply if you want to make your accent easier to understand! ✔

Many people believe that if they say every vowel & consonant sound correctly, they’ll have a perfect American accent.

This is not how it works!!!

Vowel & consonant sounds are important…..but… even if you say every SOUND correctly, your speech will be difficult for Americans to understand if you use the incorrect STRESS patterns.

The people I work with in my accent reduction coaching program learn & practice the rules for stress in every session.

That’s because this feature of spoken English is CRITICAL for comprehensibility!

Questions?

You can ask me a question at SKYPE: confidentvoice.  Text questions only please!! ✍

To LEARN MORE about how we use stress in American English, or other problems encountered by your language group, choose one of the links below.