Karen Van Hook, Ph.D.

Beyond Individual Sounds: The Transformative Power of Accent Coaching

If you speak English as a foreign language, see if this sounds familiar:

• You learned to pronounce ‘ng’ pretty well when you’re practicing—but it seems impossible to do it in full-speed conversation.
• You practice ‘th’ until you can do it perfectly when you’re speaking one word at a time—but when you talk to someone, you’re making the same mistakes as ever.
• You can do a great American ‘r’ in some words, but there are a lot of words where it feels awkward or even impossible.

Why Traditional Pronunciation Classes Often Fail

The problem is that typical pronunciation classes focus on individual sounds. They don’t teach how the speakers put the sounds together. It’s like trying to learn a dance by learning individual steps but never learning the whole dance. And every language does the “dance” of speaking a little bit differently. These are some of the things that are different in different languages:

• the rhythm of your jaw movements
• the specific way you move your tongue
• how you use your breath to support your voice
• how you move from one sound to another in a word
• how you move from one word to another in a sentence

If you try to do individual sounds correctly while everything else is moving in a different way, naturally it’s frustrating. You’re combining moves from two totally different systems—like trying to tango and waltz at the same time.

How Accent Coaching Makes the Difference

Accent coaching means digging deeper into the foundations and getting things right from the ground up. It means learning the whole system—how movement and rhythm and breath work together. Then the individual sounds fall into place naturally. Everything feels smoother and easier. The sounds of the language “make sense” in your mouth.

Real Stories: How Accent Reduction Changes Everything

I’ve seen again and again that this approach works. One of my clients was a Japanese speaker who felt exhausted after speaking English. We worked on changing his style of movement, so that he began to use more of the same technique as a native English speaker. More than once, he said “This is so much easier than what I was doing before!”

If you’ve worked hard on individual sounds and still feel stuck, the problem isn’t you—it’s the approach. Set up a free consultation with me to find out how changing the whole movement pattern can transform your English.