Sooo I just looked like a huge fool a few minutes ago. Called the producer of a show that will come to my town and I had to call him up and speak in english. Done that before, got to interview Steve Marker from Garbage once and he was really nice, but after learning how to (kinda) read and write the language, it's the speaking side of it that always terrifies me.
Back on topic, he was telling me the password to access a press-only side of his website and it took me a bit to figure it out, when he found out I wasn't really getting it, he asked me for my email and I had to spell it for him...only to find out that I was mentioning the wrong letters. Managed to get it right and again, he was really nice to me, but boy, I felt really embarassed about the whole thing.
I never got the chance to practice speaking a lot when I was growing up and now at almost fucking 29 years old I'm discovering I'm really bad at this language, which is one of the main reasons I don't like to play online games (even on GAF) because almost everyone is an American and I'm way to afraid too let my marvelous mexican accent to show up and messing up.
Anyone has a similar experience to share? I feel kinda bummed about this and will look for some courses so it won't happen again.
Dude, do you play Mario Kart 8 Deluxe? Come on over to the Discord channel and voice chat with us. It's true that most people are Americans, but every now and then there'll be people from other countries who are not native speakers, such as myself. A fellow GAFfer and I have a cute nickname for guys like you (who play MK8 that is): Shyguys
.
In all seriousness though, I get it. I'm fairly fluent and I have a pretty good -though not perfect - accent given where I'm from, but I still feel awkward when I speak most of the time,
especially when I'm on the phone. Phone calls in a foreign language are the worst. I get very nervous. Palms are sweaty, mom's spaghetti and all that.
If you wanna improve your accent like I did, I suggest shadowing your favorite shows, movies, podcast, whatever, i.e. repeating what people/characters say word for word, sound for sound, with the same rhythm. Basically, try imitating them.
But the most important thing is to change your mindset. The reason why most people struggle with accents, apart from not being used to pronouncing certain sounds, is because they're picturing words as words, i.e. as strings of
written letters with a meaning. The problem is that when you do that, you automatically bring with it your own knowledge and interpretation of how words and letters should be said
in your own language. In reality, you should listen carefully to the sounds you're hearing without worrying about spelling or meaning.
Be like a child who's learning to speak for the first time: they don't understand most things they're hearing, they don't know how to write, and they have no preconceived notions of how something should be said. Because their native language is "no language", they're learning it from scratch by pure imitation of what they're hearing. This piece of advice is especially useful when you're trying to learn something like English, where so many sounds are counterintuitive relative to the way they're spelled.
I'll get a bit technical on you, but bare with me, this is for the sake of illustration. Take the word "development" for instance: if you're a Spanish speaker or a French speaker (like me), you probably think that the "o" in "lop" and the "e" in "ment" are two different vowels. And why shouldn't you? They are, indeed, different vowels and sounds in Spanish, French, and most other languages. Not always so in English. It turns out they both the "o" and the last "e" in that specific word sound the same. I don't mean "sort of" or "almost", I mean
exactly the same. Don't believe me? Look up the phonetic spelling, and you'll see that they're both represented by the same phonetic letter. That's because of the way English handles stress accent. I won't go into detail here, but the point is: things are not what they seem, and you must first unlearn what you know of writtend and spoken language as a Spanish speaker if you want to learn how to speak as an English speaker. That's why when I tell you to listen without any preconceptions, and to shadow your favorite shows by straight up imitating the characters, I mean it. Don't look for meaning. Look for sounds. That's the mindset you wanna acquire if you want to make progress fast, become more confident, and feel awesome. It'll feel weird at first, because it's not natural at all, but it'll all be worth it in the end.
[EDIT] One last thing: God knows I hate the French accent, but in the end, foreign accents are not a big deal, and some native speakers love them. I'm anal about this stuff so I do my best to have a great accent, but realistically speaking, as long as your accent is not so thick that people have a hard time following what you say, you're all good.
