Valerie Fridland

speaker

155 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 30 Mar

Valerie Fridland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

All Ears English Podcast · AEE 2590: 3 Tips to Keep Your Accent and Be Understood With Valerie Fridland · 30 Mar 2026 podcast

Children soak it up.

I know.

Thank goodness it lets us off the hook as parents.

Children soak up the language of their environment and their brains and their mouths are automatically programmed to kind of pick up and learn the sounds of the environment, the structures of the environment.

And then by the age of about 12, our brains and our mouths kind of lock in on that system, on that first language system.

So that's a great thing for learning language like a sponge.

But it's a bad thing for those of us after the age of 12 that are trying to learn a new language because basically our mouths and our minds are programmed by that first language.

So no matter what you do, any subsequent language you're trying to learn will be affected by the first language because that is sort of the way we're designed.

And what we have to remember is that whenever we approach a second language, it is going to be filtered by the way we understand our first language.

And so we're not all coming to the task of second language learning the same way.

It really does depend on the language background that you're coming from.

So, for example, if your language doesn't have a TH sound, like the TH in the or these, which 92% of languages do not have, only 8% of languages, English happens to be one of them, have that TH sound.

between your teeth, right?

It's kind of a weird sound.

It's like you're spitting.

So that's a hard sound.

So what we find though, is depending on your language background, what you substitute for that sound will depend on your first language.

So it's not just a random substitution.

If you're French or German, especially European French,

Showing 41–60 of 155 · page 3 of 8