How to improve your accent with audio books

Here is a great way to work on improving your American accent:

Buy a book on audio. I suggest a non-fiction topic because the speech is generally better suited for this type of practice.

Listen to a sentence or a phrase, then pause it and repeat what the speaker said. At the same time, record this so that you can listen back and compare how you sound versus the speaker on the audio. Keep in mind that this is not a memory test. If you don't remember things word for word once in a while, just keep going. Some phrases will be longer than others.

It's a good idea to also have the hard copy of the book so that you can sometimes just play it while reading the text. This is especially valuable if you read the text first, only a few pages for example, and underline the difficult or new words. That way you can later pay close attention to how these words sound in context. Also try to listen to the intonation and word stress. Do this often. It will help you a lot!

I DON"T recommend Amazon's product, Kindle, which seems to be a computer generated voice and not an actual human reading. The speech sounds artificial without any rhythm nor melody.

S or Z?

Alex asks:

Hello Lisa,

You say in your book that the final "s" in the words "is" and "has" is pronounced as /z/. Then what if when "it is" and "it has" are contracted to "it's", does the "s" remain /z/ sound?

Many thanks,
Alex

Hi Alex,

When "it is" is contracted to "it's" the S sounds like /s/, not /z/. This is because it comes after the "t", which is a voiceless consonant. (Rule #1 on page 59 of my book, "Mastering the American Accent.") Good observation Alex. Make sure you memorize that list (on page 60) of common words that end in /s/ which is pronounced as a /z/. I regularly have students that make this mistake. Even today I was correcting my Italian student who was saying "wasss" instead of "wazzz."
I wish it were simpler. In most other languages these kinds of changes don't occur.

Accent Reduction Practice with Singing

Paolo asks:

Is singing songs a good way to improve my pronunciaton or not? I'm just asking because sometimes rappers or singers tend to pronounce words with a different "cadence" just to make them rhyme with one another, what do you think?

Yes, singing is a great for improving your accent. Just be careful not to pick up the bad grammar and the over-use of slang is many songs, especially rap. I remember the Rolling Stones song "Satisfaction." They sing, "I can't get no satisfaction." That's a double negative. Some of my students end up talking that way.

I have reminded you in the past, but it's worth repeating: BE CAREFUL ABOUT WHO YOUR ROLE MODELS OF SPEECH ARE!!" Obama... yes, Rock 'n' roll and rap... NO!

Good question Paolo.