Sounding American

The hardest part about learning English is losing the accent

Holding up a mirror to her face, Mariela Cabarcas sees a glimpse of her new life in the United States.

Her lipstick and mascara are already in place. She studies the shape of her mouth as she attempts to pronounce a correct "o" in American English — like the one in "hot."

But buffered by her Latina accent, the curve of her lip slips and out comes a sound like the "a" in "hat."

Since Cabarcas, 42, started absorbing her native Spanish as a child, she's used a set of sounds familiar to her ear.

To speak English, foreigners rely on the map provided by their first language — resulting in an accent that sticks.

That is, unless they consciously obliterate it.

During the four hours Cabarcas and other students in the accent reduction class are at the Naples Language Center each week, much of what they know about language must be tucked away in a discrete corner of their memories.

The 12-week course aims to ingrain the sounds of English into their speech patterns, thereby reducing the influence of their native language.

"People might not understand you if you prounounce your vowels wrong," Velasco explains to her students.

With a shake of her head, Cabarcas concentrates harder. Until the reflection of her mouth in the mirror is pronounciation-perfect, being fluent in English isn't enough, she says.

All eight students in the class agree: The hardest part about becoming an American is sounding like one.

"It's an important part of assimilating to U.S. culture," Cabarcas says.

Once an engineer and politician, Cabarcas feared the guerrillas and left Colombia with her family five years ago. In the United States, she works in quality assurance for a medical device manufacturer.

Every day she speaks with the federal administration, describing in detail the scientific information she has compiled to prove her company's products are safe.

Cabarcas says she can explain everything fine. But when they hear her accent, she can tell that she sometimes loses their attention.

"It's a psychological thing," Cabarcas says.

All over the world people pick out the accents of foreigners, says Carolyn Adger, director of the Language and Society division of the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C. But because English is spoken by so many different people, Americans may be the most aware of them — and the most critical, she says.

"If a person wants to buy an airplane ticket and they get answered by someone who is obviously Indian, they don't think, 'Oh, they are speaking Indian English.' They'll think, 'This person can't help me.'"

Talking can be a burden for the speaker when what they say is less important than how they sound, Velasco says.

"The accent is fossilized and has become so ingrained that it's really hard to get rid of it," she says. "An adult who learns a language is never going to speak perfectly. Yet professionals don't want an accent to jump out at you."

Naples is cosmopolitan enough that residents are used to hearing and interpreting accents from Cuban to Polish, she says. Midwestern snowbirds, however, are not. Non-native English speakers are constantly met with a cupped ear and a "Huh? I don't understand you" during season, Velasco says.

Zapping that phrase is a matter of switching consonants and vowels, depending on the sounds used in a person's native tongue. For example, Korean students switch "l" for "r," and Portuguese speakers switch "y" for "j."

But intonation — the "music" of a language — is a universal struggle.

" La la la ," Korean-born Hyunuk Choi reads from a book during a class earlier this month. In the sentence "Sam sees Bill." "La la la," he reads. "She wants one."As he exaggerates the up-and-down musical "staircase" of a sentence, he pulls on a rubberband that Velasco has given each student to help remind them where to put the stress.

"If you stress the wrong syllable, you can totally lose the meaning of the word," Velasco says. "American Accent Training" covers problem areas including intonation, pronounciation and liaisons — the sounds made between words that native speakers may never think about but that trip up English learners.

It was the first English as a Second Language book to address these issues. Author Ann Cook, whose language school is based in southern California, says she has taught English since she was a "fully unemployable" college graduate and traveled to Japan for a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages program.

Even if her students were perfect in grammar and vocabulary, Cook felt her teaching efforts were trivialized due to a pesky accent. One of her Japanese students had become so good at English that she put him on the phone to show her father. After he'd spoken a few sentences in what to Cook was impressive American, she took the phone back.

"But dear, I don't speak Japanese," her father said.

Her father hadn't understood a word he'd said.

It's harder for adults to sound like a native speaker, says Adger.

Ana Maria Tovar of Naples sent her two children from Colombia to an exchange program in Minnesota to learn English when they were in high school. Within a year, Andres, now 27, and Natalia, 24, were fluent.

"Why can't you learn English?" Tovar's daughter, Natalia, asked her. "We did it."

If she had the time and money to spend, she says, she would.

Tovar, 50, is used to having Natalia correct her linguistic imperfections.

"It's difficult controlling my accent," Tovar says.

Part of that stems from being surrounded by others who speak the same way, says Carolyn Anger of the Center for Applied Linguistics. "When someone lives in a community of other people who produce English in a particular way, they are influenced by how the other people speak," she says. "That becomes a norm in that community."

Tovar and her husband try to make English their first language at home. But with no Americans around, it's either English with an accent or back to Spanish.


You say potato ...

Combinations of sounds that are common in English may rarely show up in other languages. That's when mispronounciations — such as "th" in the word three (below) — occur. For examples, because the "th" sound does not exist in German, a native German speaker would modify it to a similar sound they're used to, a light "t."

Here is how the English word three might be pronounced by speakers of different languages.

American: three

German: tree

French: sree

Russian: zhree

Korean: ssree (long "s" sound)

Hindi: dree

Dangerous liaisons

Liaisons — connections between words — form the underlying hum of a language's music. And if you can hum the song, you can eventually sing it. When Americans say, "Tell him," the two words flow together so that it sounds more like "tellim." But that doesn't come naturally to a non-native speakers.

In Chinese, words end in vowels, so an 'l' ending, followed by another consonant, is difficult to pronounce. Liaisons force the final syllable of one word to be pronounced by pushing it over to the beginning of the next word, where Chinese speaking have no trouble — not even with "l."

English phrase: Tell him

Chinese pronounciation: Teo him

With liaisons: Tellim

English phrase: Pull it out

Chinese pronounciation: Puw ih aw

With liaisons: P li dout