Accent Reduction
Why accent reduction?
Better communication in business. Clearer expression of your thoughts and ideas.
I had the good fortune of growing up in a rich and colorful immigrant environment. I was born in Germany. My mother was born in Croatia and my father was born in Serbia. On top of that, I was an altar boy in a Russian Orthodox church. All this, while growing up in Pennsylvania surrounded by Americans.
I and my siblings, early on, developed American accents; we were so young when we arrived here from overseas that our lips and tongues absorbed the neighboring sounds. Our parents and our parents' peers weren't so blessed. They had deeply embedded phonic patterns. Rs were always rolled and "TH" sounds were constantly confounding. Our American friends couldn't understand them, but to us, they were totally coherent.
What I discovered much later in life, was that people of visiting cultures actually have a kind of deafness to certain speech idioms. It would be similar to a person who is color blind. It's the phenomenon that makes Japanese people say R instead of L and Russians say velcome instead of welcome. They just don't hear it.
It's my job as an observer, a person with a musician's ear, a mimic (a key ingredient to learning to sing a song just like Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin or Beyonce), to hear what is "American" versus what is not.
My experience with voiceover too, tells me when and how to jumble words together so I won't stumble while reading them; when to pronounce the TH an when to blend it into the next word. This is all something that a foreign learner of English would greatly benefit from. After all, coming from places far off to the USA with the intention of increasing one's earning power and quality of life, can only be enhanced and fortified by being able to converse clearly in the language of one's host country.
Let me show you what I know, with my accumulated experience in listening, and muscle retraining (something you'll hear me talk about when learning an instrument), so that you can speak English with clarity and precision.
Better communication in business. Clearer expression of your thoughts and ideas.
I had the good fortune of growing up in a rich and colorful immigrant environment. I was born in Germany. My mother was born in Croatia and my father was born in Serbia. On top of that, I was an altar boy in a Russian Orthodox church. All this, while growing up in Pennsylvania surrounded by Americans.
I and my siblings, early on, developed American accents; we were so young when we arrived here from overseas that our lips and tongues absorbed the neighboring sounds. Our parents and our parents' peers weren't so blessed. They had deeply embedded phonic patterns. Rs were always rolled and "TH" sounds were constantly confounding. Our American friends couldn't understand them, but to us, they were totally coherent.
What I discovered much later in life, was that people of visiting cultures actually have a kind of deafness to certain speech idioms. It would be similar to a person who is color blind. It's the phenomenon that makes Japanese people say R instead of L and Russians say velcome instead of welcome. They just don't hear it.
It's my job as an observer, a person with a musician's ear, a mimic (a key ingredient to learning to sing a song just like Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin or Beyonce), to hear what is "American" versus what is not.
My experience with voiceover too, tells me when and how to jumble words together so I won't stumble while reading them; when to pronounce the TH an when to blend it into the next word. This is all something that a foreign learner of English would greatly benefit from. After all, coming from places far off to the USA with the intention of increasing one's earning power and quality of life, can only be enhanced and fortified by being able to converse clearly in the language of one's host country.
Let me show you what I know, with my accumulated experience in listening, and muscle retraining (something you'll hear me talk about when learning an instrument), so that you can speak English with clarity and precision.