Ask HN: How to Do Accent Reduction?

"If you are interested in accent modification, you can contact a speech-language pathologist. Accent modification is not provided in the medical setting, so try a private practician or a nearby university that has a graduate program in communication disorders or speech-language pathology. Not every program will have a therapist with this type of experience. I know that Emerson College used to have an experience accent mod therapist, though that may have changed. Many therapists can provide services remotely if there's not someone near you." (Quoted from my partner, an SLP.)

One tip from reading this post: I can see that you're writing sentences that are too long.

- Write simple small sentences.

- Put a space after your periods.

- For engineering communication use white-space liberally. This last one is not standard English writing style, but I love it for work communication.

Try shadowing.

Shadowing is basically just playing audio and repeating what you hear as soon as you hear it. You can do it by just watching Netflix/youtube. The ideal setup is a pair of headphones and microphone that plays your own voice back into your headphones to help you hear yourself.

Focused shadowing sessions will increase your awareness of sounds that differ in your current spoken voice and your goal.

One more thing: Watch out for 'small' mistakes in your writing. No space between a period and the next sentence. Pronoun 'I' not being capitalized. Spelling mistakes. They tend not to cause communication problems but people may label you as having weak English because of them.

It's a solved problem that remains unsolved for other reasons. I've seen this tried a bit and... not always a great success.

Often a HR 'initiative' or management whim to buy a product or hire someone dedicated to this, but it's got to have management momentum.

Take a call centre - easy to add into feedback, measure, monitor, should gel with on-the-job performance, the feedback often with a dedicated QA or QA team providing input.

Take a (classic, bigorg) development team - not so much regular communication (spoken), and what there is gets stuffed into conference calls and [fake] 'scrums'. Those that already have good communication (and technical) skills do OK, those hired for technical skills (with language and softer skills taking a back seat, as when a role is created or becomes free then filling it with someone reasonably up-to-speed becomes the priority - I know this is setting yourself up to fail - and 'language' a long term improvement target - if someone's gone through 10 years+ of English language education I don't think 2 hours coaching per week, now with a fulltime job, perhaps getting married, social life, perhaps kids, other hobbies, is going to work but for all but the most committed).

It's a solved problem. What's not solved is banging management head against the wall with (long term) bad-fit hires OR giving staff a proper amount of time (10 hours pr week, company time, personal time as they choose) to allow them to develop as a long term fit with the company.

And on development conference calls - so so so many times dominated by someone in a position of seniority or more fluent language to the extent no one else gets a chance to get practice of making a substantial and cooperative (i.e. discuss, not just blast what's been done) contribution and having a discussion (going round "what's achieved, what are you doing, any roadblocks" doesn't count).

One thing I recommend is making sure the English native speakers you talk to know that you want to improve your accent. Make them realize that you would welcome their corrections and suggestions.

Also, there's a big difference between accent and grammar. Make sure you work on both, because one without the other will still cause problems.