Don’t Worry Too Much About Your Accent

You can say I’m a bit obsessed when it comes to having a good accent in Spanish. Although my goal always was to have a spotless accent, I decided to more or less give up that dream. Do I think it’s impossible? No, I certainly think that it’s possible to have a spotless accent in a foreign language. The point is; I think time could be spend better on other things.

Don’t get me wrong; I still spend time on improving my accent (some natives I meet say there are still a few tracks of foreigness in my speech, which I want to weed out whenever possible). But the better you get, the harder it becomes to eliminate the foreign things that remain.

What are the things that cause you to have an accent? The most common problem is that you pronounce things in a wrong way. My problem first was being unable to pronounce a correct ‘r’ (fixed that), and recently I discovered that my ‘d’ wasn’t really Spanish (I pronounced it too much like a ‘t’ (like in Dutch) – fixed by now). Another problem could be that you still pronounce words separately (I always had that problem until coming to Spain and having to speak a lot with natives. Listening to them and myself and being able to improve myself I tackled this. This proves that speaking can actually fix some parts of your speech). And then there’s the wonderful thing called “intonation”. Getting a correct intonation is actually pretty hard to get, and is often fixed with a mix of heavy listening and speaking (and listening to yourself!).

So we can safely say that having a native or near-native accent is really hard to get, and maybe even impossible for most people (I heard some Japanese natives saying that even Khatzumoto of AJATT has a bit of a foreign accent in Japanese, although the Antimoon guys tackled a native American accent without a problem). That’s why I’m giving the following tip: don’t worry too much about your accent!

Notice that I say accent, not pronunciation. The two are completely different things. Like we discussed, an accent is mainly intonation or not a fully correct pronunciation of all letters (although still regarded correct, but foreign).

Pronunciation, however, is something you should really tackle as soon as possible. People can understand you perfectly if you have a slight accent or if you ‘de’ or ‘ce’ is a bit off, but having a shipwrecked pronunciation (like pronouncing the ‘r’ in an American way or the final ‘o’ if it were a German ‘ö’ (also very common for Americans)) will make things ugly. People will tune out, stop listening to you because it sucks.

Example: the mother of a good friend of mine is English. She came to Spain about 20 years ago and started learning Spanish right away. Now, 20 years later, she speaks it fluently without making a single grammatical error. She doesn’t have an accent, no; her pronunciation is f*cked up! When speaking with her at a party last week I really had to do my best to keep up with her, because I actually have to translate her wrong pronunciation to a correct one in my head. This takes quite some energy I can tell you, and not all people are willing to do that.

So, having a foreign accent? Improve it, but don’t worry too much. Having a wrong pronunciation? Get better at it, right now!

Tagged as: accent, Pronunciation