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.

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

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

you'll actually substitute probably a Z sound most often.

But say you're Russian or Hindi speaker as a first language, you'll actually substitute probably a D or a T sound.

So what we see is that how you come to the task of second language acquisition is really, really affected and filtered by that first language.

Oh my goodness, that's so funny because my parents are both French native speakers and my mom still rolls her eyes every time I try to do the rounded front vowels of French because we don't have rounded front vowels in English.

So it's really, really hard as a speaker growing up with an English background to learn to produce those.

And I as well just had to kind of get over it.

And my mother would make the miche de noel every Christmas.

And she was like, please just don't even say it.

Just look at it and appreciate it and just don't say it.

Yes.

And it became sort of a cute joke and sort of a way of warmth and compassion for us.

Absolutely.

Right, exactly.

So my second tip is kind of a play on the first, which is that once we can accept that being native-like shouldn't be our goal or doesn't need to be our goal and that it's really hard to achieve that, then what we really need to recognize is the goal that's most important is being intelligible and clear.

And I think that a lot of times non-native speakers get really concerned about the sound of their accent, that it's heavy, it's a heavy sounding accent.

So my second tip is that having a heavy sounding accent does not necessarily mean you cannot be clear with that accent.

So if we look at research,

Yes, absolutely.

But what we also find is intelligibility is actually a separate measure.

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