Lindsay McMahon

Those features of connected speech, the phonemes that might be problematic from your first language.

There are things you can do to make sure your speech is clear, but you should keep your accent.

Your accent is beautiful.

I don't know about you, Valerie, but most Americans I know love an accent.

Yes.

And our whole goal here, we know that you listeners agree, is connection, not perfection.

So you can connect with your accent, right?

Yes, you want to make sure your speech is understood, but you would never want fear of

of your accent being unclear to keep you from a conversation, from connecting in English.

So Valerie, I'm excited for you to share three tips for listeners today who might be worried, might have some of these fears of things that you can do to be able to connect in English with an accent.

You may have no sounds that require you to stick your tongue out between your teeth.

Yes, I definitely saw this with French, the first language that I learned with the sound, which was so foreign for my mouth to make.

And I was letting it keep me from, you know, the self-awareness of that, the lack of confidence, because I knew I was making that mistake, kept me from connections and opportunities.

And I finally had to just accept that I struggled with that sound.

I was working on it, but I knew it wouldn't always be perfect.

And I had to choose just like I'm still going to have conversations and just hope the people I am talking to don't really care.

Just don't say it.

Yes.

And we'll do our best, but we're not going to say it perfectly every time.

And, you know, everyone we're talking to just has to accept us for who we are.