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

So when we look at studies at how well native speakers can transcribe or repeat what a non-native speaker says, what we notice is that even speakers that they report as hearing is very heavily accented.

doesn't impact intelligibility necessarily more than a light accent.

So I think we have to get away from the sense that our accent heaviness is a problem and really aim for intelligibility because it's not the heaviness of your accent.

It's not that distance between your system and the native system that is causing the problems.

Instead, it's

specific sounds.

So going back to that TH sound, for example, a lot of speakers are going to have problems with that.

In fact, my parents who are French speakers still really can't produce it.

And they've been in the United States for many, many years and decades, in fact, but it doesn't really cause intelligibility problems because there are very few words in English where substituting a D for a TH, like saying these as D's is going to create a meaning problem.

are a confusion problem for a native speaker because there's not competing words with that.

But if you have, for example, a problem with R and L and you substitute one for the other, so instead of saying lip, for example, you say something like rip, that actually creates two separate words and that will create a lot of meaning confusion, right?

So it's not about...

how many sounds you have different.

It's about the specific sounds that you have different.

And that's where sort of tip three comes in.

Absolutely.

And I think that's what we want to get away from is thinking that, oh, I have a heavy accent.

People can't understand me.

Instead, it's I might have a heavy accent, but let me make sure that people can understand me by working on the things that I know does cause problems rather than getting hung up on this idea that, oh, I have a heavy accent.

I need to get rid of the accent.

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