It’s a confidence game that’s why. You can’t afford to sound weak, timid, confused, incoherent, nervous, anxious or funny (as in weird). You sound funny when you speak fluent yet not fully intelligible English. Some Indians are a good example of that. They speak fluently and confidently but boy do they sound hilarious or what? No offense. I really don’t mean to be mean (nasty), and I’m not claiming all Indians sound funny when they speak English, but many of them do.
Let’s face it. Many English learners do not sound very confident with their English. The truth is, who can blame them? (I can but that’s for another article). I mean, how could you ever sound confident when half of the words you think you know seem to vanish when you need them? How could you sound confident when you keep finding yourself making the same mistakes hundreds of times despite knowing that they ARE mistakes and why they actually are! How could you sound confident when your ear hears a big gap between the sounds coming out of a native speaker’s mouth and those coming out of yours. It’s almost impossible to sound confident when your brain is trying to remember the right words it needs to carry on with the conversation, when it’s either trying to self-monitor or self-correct in real time, and on top of all that, when it’s aware of the sound gap between you and native speakers. Imagine how exhausting it is for your poor brain to have all these things to do in just few seconds.
Now one solution is to play it “a la Indians”, you just spit out any word your brain can dig up even if it’s inappropriate in the context in which it’s being used, shut off your brain’s monitorial function and finally turn your deaf ear and overlook the sound gap.
Another solution is a bit wiser and harder but most certainly more effective and worthwhile. You fix your accent. Bridge that gap. It’s distracting you. It is the real culprit that is causing the sudden loss of memory, the frequent recurrence of the same old mistakes and of course the nervousness, incoherence and lack of confidence. Do you know why you should believe me? Do you know why you should believe that fixing your accent will put an end to all this trouble and take your Enhlish to a whole new level? Because it’s unbelievably difficult! Once you do it though, all your problems disappear. Your brain will finally relax and have fewer things to do. If you get intensive ear and mouth training, your brain will find the words it is looking for as sounds, not as shapes. It’s much easier for your brain to store sounds rather than an infinite number of shapes of combined letters.
As I mentioned in a previous article, there are approximately 40 sounds but only 26 letters in English with hundreds of spelling patterns which your brain is simply unable to store in its visual memory. Have mercy on your brain! Fixing your accent or improving your accent could seem an aim beyond reach as it is truly difficult, no doubt about that, but it works. It definitely does. The sooner you start the better!
What about you? How do you think speaking English with a good accent matters?
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