I was inspired to write this because of what happened with one of my accent reduction students today. First I want to tell you about my personal experience with speaking French.
When I go to France, the first few days that I am there it’s a struggle to get the words out smoothly and my mouth literally hurts. The mouth muscles and lip movements used in speaking French are just so different, and sometimes it’s just exhausting. I want to give up and just go back to speaking English. But if I keep trying to imitate the sounds that exist only in French but not in English, after about four or five days it’s so much easier. At that point, I feel confident about speaking it again and it becomes really fun. (It may sound wierd to some people, but for me speaking foreign languages well is fun and very fulfilling.)
My Chinese student, a successful guy with an MBA, came in for a lesson today. I love his discipline. He generally practices every day when he first gets up. But this time he told me that he hadn’t practiced working on this accent for the past few days. In the beginning of the class, he said that his mouth wasn’t moving well and that he was struggling with creating the difficult sounds. By the end of the class it was a different story. He was warmed up and the sounds came out more easily and fluently.
Don’t give up when your mouth feels “stuck.” Work through it.
Some of you don’t have that many opportunities to use English a lot because you have a technical job where you don’t have to speak a lot. And then you go home to your family and you speak your native language. That doesn’t help! This is what you need to do: Talk to yourself out loud in English when you are alone. Hear yourself saying your thoughts. If you don’t like how something came out, you can fix it by repeating. No one is there to hear you! I did this when I was studying French in LA and I had no one to speak it with.
I had one student who made amazing progress by doing this every morning. He is an actor and people are shocked about how American he sounds.
Okay, that’s my motivational story for you. It’s really cold in LA today. It feels like December in Paris, but without my mouth hurting. 🙂
Good luck!!!