Thread: Looking for a native English speaker

Hi,

I'm a native Russian speaker, working on reducing my English accent.

I want to try something called "reverse accent mimicry".

Here is the explanation of this technique:

http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Hilton-Acc ... ction.html

The idea is to listen to a native speaker of your "target" language speak your native language and try to mimic their accent.
Once you are able to do that, you would switch to your "target" language while trying to preserve the intonation and rhythm of that person.

When a native English speaker speaks Russian, he/she still carries the intonation and rhythm of English no matter how hard they try to sound "Russian". And for a native Russian speaker, it would be easy to pick up and mimic the "components" of that English speaker's accent. The same works the other way around.

I'm looking for a partner to try this using Skype.

I would listen to you speak Russian and then try to mimic your accent. So in effect, I would be trying to speak broken Russian as if my native language was English.

Then, we would reverse the roles. I would be speaking English with my Russian accent. And you would try to mimic it the best you can.

I don't know how well this technique really works. But I found a couple of videos on youtube of Americans speaking Russian. I tried to mimic their accents, and I was amazed at just how differently I engaged the muscles of my tongue, lips and throat. I was speaking Russian, but I was moving my mouth as if I were a native English speaker.

It's as if I could actually feel all what I've been reading about when trying to minimize my English accent.

If anybody wants to give this a try, please let me know.

Это очень интересно.

Perhaps you mean, improve my English accent, or reduce my Russian accent? These are also different.

This method won't solve problem of th and w for native Russian speakers, no?