English Podcast | Why You Should Stop Trying to Sound Like a Native Speaker

We have to talk about your accent. Whether you're learning English or another language, I'm sure all of us have had these thoughts at some point in time. What if I sound weird? What if people judge me? Will I ever sound like a native speaker? In fact, one of the questions I get asked the most is, how can I sound more like a native speaker? And every time someone asks me this question, I honestly struggle to respond because I personally have mixed feelings about this. Because on one hand, I do feel like pronunciation is really important. Those little sounds are the foundations of any language and it's important to get the foundations right, right? But on the other hand, I do feel like sometimes people can get a little too obsessed with this idea of sounding like a native speaker or having the perfect accent. So today I want to talk about fluency, accents, identity, and why I don't think your overall goal should be to sound exactly like a native speaker. So let's start with fluency because I feel like a lot of people don't really agree on what fluency actually means. And I think a lot of people confuse fluency with perfection. You think that once you're fluent in another language, no matter the language, then that means you're never going to make any mistakes. You're going to sound exactly like a native speaker. You'll never forget a word, you'll never draw a blank on how to express something, and you're going to have a perfect accent. But I don't think that's what fluency really means. In my opinion, fluency is more about your ability to communicate. Being fluent or having fluency just means that you can smoothly and naturally express your ideas, your opinions, your thoughts, and you can have a real conversation without feeling stressed or without really, really struggling. If you're fluent, you should be able to have conversations that flow really naturally and it just feels kind of like second nature. I don't think fluency means perfection because even when you look at native speakers, they make mistakes too. Like for myself, I'm a native English speaker, but sometimes when I'm just talking naturally, maybe I'll say something grammatically incorrect. Or sometimes I draw a blank, like I forget a word suddenly. Or sometimes I misspeak, like I kind of stumble over my words. And that's totally natural, like it's human to make those kinds of mistakes. And I'm sure that when you speak in your native language, you also do similar kinds of things. So language doesn't have to be perfect all the time. That's really impossible if you think about it. Fluency is more about your ability to communicate. This leads us to another very interesting question, which is, what exactly is standard English? I find this question very interesting because if you think of a language like Chinese, then you have 普通话, or Mandarin Chinese. It's basically like a standard, right? You might hear it on the news, you might learn it in school, you use that to do exams, take tests, and all of that good stuff. And it's not only Chinese, a lot of languages do have this kind of standard that they use for more formal situations like the news or government processes. So when people start to learn English, they just assume that English has a similar kind of thing, that English also has this one single standard. This is why a lot of people try to use English news sources as a way to practice and to learn English because they just assume this must be standard English. This must be what normal people say in day-to-day life. But the stuff that you hear on the news, the way that they talk on the news, is not exactly how we talk in day-to-day life. And honestly, when you talk about English, there really isn't one standard accent or one standard in English. I mean, when you think about different countries, like for me, I'm from America, so I speak American English, but you also have British English, and someone from Australia speaks differently than how I speak, and even in Canada, they do speak a little bit different from how Americans speak usually. And then you think about inside those countries. For example, like America. I'm from the Midwest, I'm from Iowa, so what I speak is considered a very neutral accent or I guess you could assume it's the standard accent in America. But if you go to Chicago, or you go to Wisconsin, you go to Minnesota, the states surrounding where I'm from, then you're gonna hear slightly different sounds. There's a little bit of a difference in the way that we talk, the way that we pronounce things. And then you go even farther, like LA, or New York, or Boston, or even like southern parts of America, they speak very differently. There are so many regional accents in America. So when you consider all of those things, the different countries, the different accents, the different ways that people speak, it's really hard to say what the standard is. And I think that's okay, I don't think there has to be a standard, because we can all understand each other. Whether that's, you know, within America, Americans talking to each other no matter where they're from, there's no struggle to communicate or to be understood. Or if I talk to someone from England, I talk to someone from Australia, Canada, as long as we speak English, there's really no problem communicating. Honestly, everyone has their own way of speaking, and even an individual person might have a make them stand out from other people. So the question is, if native speakers don't all sound alike, then who exactly are we trying to sound like? This reminds me of something that one of my professors said in a recent class that I took, and it was a class on bilingualism and how to raise children to be fluent in multiple languages, to be bilingual. It was a very interesting class, I learned a lot. But one day we were talking about children who grow up bilingual and how it might have an impact on the languages that they speak, we were talking about accents, and she said everyone has an accent. And now, upon hearing that, some of my classmates immediately disagreed. They were like, what? No way! Like, I'm American, I only speak English, I've never even been abroad, I don't have an accent. But that's actually not true. As long as you speak, as long as you say things, you have an accent. Just like I was saying, even within America, there are different regional accents. An accent is just a reflection of where you come from. It's a reflection of your culture and even your family. So yes, everyone has an accent. There's no such thing as having no accent. If you had no accent, then that would mean you never spoke, ever. As language learners, we often see language as a tool for communication. And I would agree with that, I think that's true in some ways, but I also think that language is a symbol of your identity. Especially when it comes to accents, I do think it's a part of who you are and I don't think it's something that we should be ashamed of at all. But I'm also not going to sit here and pretend that accents don't matter at all, because unfortunately they do. We can't deny that sometimes people make judgments based on how we look or how we dress or even how we speak or what accent we have. So sometimes people can feel a certain type of way about a certain type of accent and that can lead to unfair treatment and discrimination. This was actually proven in an experiment done by someone named John Baugh. This was about 20 years ago, but I still think it's really prevalent today. He wanted to see how people perceived different types of accents. So what he did was he would call people on the phone. They couldn't see him, they couldn't make any judgments about what he looked like, only about what he sounded like. And he would call different places asking about renting opportunities. He was trying to rent an apartment. And each time he called, he would use a different type of accent. He would do like a Caucasian accent, he would try like a more black accent, a Hispanic accent. Just different ways of speaking, but he was saying the exact same things. The content was all the same and he was also very polite in each different accent. But believe it or not, it led to very different results. The callback rate was really different depending on which accent he used. Now can you guess which ones didn't get a callback? This whole experiment basically proved that different ways of speaking led to different outcomes and different opportunities in life. When he spoke with a black accent or a Hispanic accent, you know, he didn't really get as many callbacks. He didn't get as many opportunities. After this experiment, he coined the term linguistic profiling, which is a kind of discrimination against someone's race or ethnic background based on the way that they speak or the accent that they have. So far, we've been using the word accent, but I actually think accent is a really broad term. It's one thing to have a regional accent, but I think it's a totally different thing to have an accent because English is not your first language. For example, maybe you know this TV show called Modern Family, and maybe you know there's a character named Gloria. She's very beautiful, right? Yes. But English is not her first language. Spanish is her native language, and it's just kind of this running joke the whole show that she speaks English in a funny way or she has this accent or she doesn't know how to say certain things. It's kind of like this running joke. People always make fun of her. There is one particular episode that really struck me though, and it's this episode where Gloria makes a new friend. She makes friends with someone else mostly because they share the same native language. They can speak Spanish to each other. They can understand each other on a deeper level because they share the same language. And the people around them are kind of getting annoyed in some ways because first of all, they don't really understand why they became friends and why they hang out together so much. And also they feel like they're kind of left out. They don't understand what they're talking about. They don't understand the jokes that they say or they don't understand why suddenly they started laughing. They just feel totally left out of the conversation. But if Gloria tries to say the same things in English, people laugh at her, people make fun of her because her English isn't perfect. So Gloria just gets really frustrated and she says something like, you have no idea how smart and how funny I am when I speak Spanish. And I just think about this scene all the time because it's so true. People often mistake language ability for someone's intelligence or humor or whatever it may be. Maybe it's some part of human nature to judge people in this way, I don't know, but it shouldn't be like that because your language level is not a representation of how smart you are, how funny you are. Honestly, one of the hardest things in the world is to be funny in another language. It's so difficult. And someone like Gloria having an accent like that, it doesn't mean that she's not smart, she's not funny or whatever. It just means that she speaks more than one language. Now after everything that I've said, you might think that I'm saying, pronunciation doesn't matter, you don't have to care about it, you don't have to work on it. That's not what I'm saying at all. I think that pronunciation is incredibly important. We still need to learn how to pronounce things clearly and we still need to practice saying things clearly because that's how other people are going to be able to understand you. And when you practice this pronunciation, you're getting better at understanding other people. All of this is just to help you with communication. But during the process of communication, it's okay to have an accent. Everyone has an accent. And I don't think sounding like a native speaker should be the goal. I think clear and effective communication should be the goal. But I also do understand that it might take some time for us to get used to the idea of accepting our accent. Personally, for me, when I'm in China or when I'm speaking Chinese, sometimes I get embarrassed because I say things wrong. I say something with the wrong tone and someone corrects me. It can be really embarrassing, but I think we just have to embrace it because going through that, being embarrassed, making mistakes, it's how we improve. There are definitely times when I wish I could sound more natural speaking Chinese. I wish I could sound exactly like a native Chinese speaker, but it's just not realistic and that's okay. People do notice accents and some people even make judgments based on someone's accent. But it's just like so many other things in this world. People judge others based on what they wear, what they do, what they look like, or what they study, etc, etc. There are so many things that people can be judgmental of, but I think as a language learner, it's especially important for us to just be able to accept our accent. I don't think that having an accent should be something that stops us from making new friends, from communicating in different ways, and from seeking out other opportunities. It's really not something to be ashamed of. And having an accent is really natural. It doesn't mean that you're bad at this language, it doesn't mean that you're not smart, you're not capable, it just means that you know more than one language. You're bilingual, you're multilingual, and that's really amazing. That's something we should all be proud of. I think we can still keep practicing pronunciation. We can keep learning how to say things more clearly, and that way we can have smoother communication later on. But don't let this impossible goal of sounding like a native speaker be something that makes you feel embarrassed or stops you from having conversations and makes you feel less confident. At the end of the day, it's totally natural to have an accent. Everyone has one, and it's just a part of you. It's a part of your identity and a part of your personal history. Alright guys, if you made it to the end of this video, I want to say thank you. Thanks for watching, thanks for listening, thanks for watching all the way to the end. That's really crazy. I mean, that's great. Thank you. And don't be shy, leave a like and a comment if you learned something, if you enjoyed this podcast episode. I do try to read as many comments as I can. There are a lot of them sometimes, so I might miss a few. But I did read the comments from the last podcast episode, and I saw a lot of people saying that they enjoyed it, they learned a lot, you know, they liked listening to me talk. So don't worry, I'm going to keep posting these episodes, I also really like making these and talking to you guys, sharing my ideas, and also reading your own ideas in the comments. So, you know, don't be afraid to tell me what you're thinking, what's going through your mind at this exact moment. And that's basically it for today, I will talk to you guys in the next video. Okay, buh-bye.