hello everyone I hope you're doing well in today's video we're going to talk about accents
and pronunciation and specifically the topic of accent reduction in today's video a friend
of mine whose name is Rod is going to talk about accent reduction accent reduction is a process of
reducing your accent in a second language and the result is a kind of pronunciation or accent that's
easier to understand that sounds maybe near native so accent reduction is one goal that
some people will choose but other people will work on their pronunciation in a different way
and it's totally up to you there is no right or wrong answer Rod is going to talk about
what accent reduction is he has a master's degree and focused specifically on accent reduction for
his masters so he knows a lot about this topic and then he's going to give some specific tips so stay
until the end of the video and then let me know in the comments below what you think hi everyone
welcome to my first interview on my channel and today i'm joined by Rod
Rod has become a friend of mine on youtube and uh or online and he's an English teacher in brazil
and we have a few things in common many of you know that i'm married to a Brazilian
and i've learned Portuguese and of course Rod and I are also both English teachers
and I invited Rod to join me today because Rod is uh a bit of an expert in something that is a
really important topic for English learners to know about the topic is accent reduction
Rod's channel on youtube is called Rod the Brazilian English teacher
and Rod first I would love for you to tell us more about your English learning journey
well first of all it's a pleasure to be here and yes we became friends and it was amazing I
love your channel and the things you do well my my English learning journey became when
I was eight years old it's funny because I saw madonna on tv and everybody knows who madonna is
and I saw her singing and jumping on the stage I was seven years old and I felt really excited
when I saw her singing and I i said I want to learn what she is talking
about and then I turned to my father and I said I want to go to school to learn English
and the next day as as I live in a very small town in an inner state of Sao Paulo my father
said okay i'm going to see about putin you in a school to study English and then he signed me
up to the school the next day and I fell in love with the English language and here I am you know
that's great and how many years have you been teaching English 25 years wow that's great i've
been teaching for about 25 years too so about the same amount of time that's great I i started
teaching I was 17. but I study English every day I study English every day actually my principal
um invited me to go teach with her you know when I finished the course she said I want you to teach
with me I said I i'm not able to teach she said you are you are very good and then she invited
me to teach with her and we worked together for 10 years and then I opened my own school and I am
working with my wife right now that's great well and you know I believe that non-native speakers of
English make excellent teachers because non-native speakers of English have been through the process
of learning the language and they understand it in a way that native speakers of English
don't understand yeah um so that's great so yeah because we know the difficulties that they have
you know so you know exactly what they go through you know maybe
yeah and you know I think also that non-native speakers of English can provide an excellent
example or a role model for learners of English yeah I totally agree Rod can you tell
us what accent reduction is well exit accent reduction can be a little bit controversial
but i'm going to put accent reduction in my perspective uh when I started learning English
when I was eight years old as I just said uh there was no way to practice we only had
movies um with that big tapes big black tapes that we would rent from blockbuster or whatever
and we didn't have the advent of internet like in four seconds you have the answers that you need
so we would practice with listening to music recording those songs that you like and listen
listen listen listen and at that time we called it repetition and suddenly changed to shadowing and
then Jenna when I had the chance to take my master's degree I took my master's degree
in Spain I chose to work with accent reduction in the sense of clearing the pronunciation of
the students because I think accent is part of you and that's why we can clear 100 of the the
accent of a language it's not possible to be 100 percent american sounding or british sounding
um so it's very important the idea that I had was to make the English pronunciation of the students
very clear that's how I tackled you know accent reduction to teach people and it
gives great results the the English of the people who study with me can you tell us
how does accent reduction work how exactly can someone do accent reduction well accent reduction
is a lot of exercises with a lot of exercises the student can clean it up and say like the proper
way to the word let me see a word that I can tell you like bit and beach you know
see the relaxed sound and the shorter something for example if one of my students wants to work
on accent reduction like what kind of exercises would he or she do like can you explain sort of
like let's say that that student has 30 minutes like what kinds of things exactly would they do
shadowing is the first one shadowing is trying to repeat exactly how the teacher how miss Jenna say
you know if you say like I can give you the example with madonna for example because madonna's
from from detroit and people from detroit say madonna with the a open you know so and people in
l.a like where you are now they say madonna which is closer so you have to choose the way you want
to speak you know because once I was talking i'm not bragging or anything but it's a funny story
once I was talking to an american person and the person asked me are you from the
midwest I said no i'm a Brazilian why because you speak like people who live in detroit
and then I did the connections because I used to watch into madonna's interviews and I used to
repeat exactly the way she was repeating the words and then I explained the person and the
person told me oh that's why you know so uh so accent reduction you have to work with
shadowing which was one of the most important things and also to relax your muscles because um
English for me is almost like singing when you're talking and I think
and I think that rhythm and intonation are the most important things when you speak English like
a government bureaucracy you have to work the word bureaucracy to go right you know so uh so English
is almost like singing as I like to say so you have to work rhythm and intonation in my humble
opinion and a lot of shadowing so with shadowing uh would a student take like a sentence that the
teacher says and then just repeat that sentence after or is it just like words or could it be
either one if they listen to something longer can they like pause it and then repeat every time
yeah we can do it with words and we can do it with longer sentences so what you have to do is just to
relax your mind and just repeat what you listen you know i'm gonna give you an an example
uh we're gonna we're gonna repeat the word bad the word bad one is being not a good person and
the other one is the place where you sleep we don't have this kind of way in Portuguese
the bad adjective a in Portuguese so it's very difficult sometimes to
to make the student to understand that he has to open his mouth and do a name out
and say an a sound bad so it's a lot of exercises like repeating it's much easier to
make them used to the sound than making them um learning the technical way to do so you know
right that makes sense do you recommend accent reduction for all English learners well um it's
up to you it's up to the student because for me let me um put you something very clear here accent
for me means identity that's why also my channel has the name Rod the Brazilian English teacher
you know we we shouldn't give up our our accent because it's beautiful it's charming
but accent reduction I really recommend because it makes your life much easier because once you your
English is clearer the more the more clearer the better the more people who understand you
without any any communication noise you will feel confident and speak more what I want students and
the people who are watching us to pay attention is never be afraid of making mistakes and
learn from them and if you find someone who corrects you when you don't want to be corrected
please turn your back and find somebody else because you'll find a lot of nice people who
will be friendly to you and help you and talk to you and one thing you guys have to do um
everybody has to do is practice practice practice practice because English is a lifelong journey
never forget that okay mostly when it's a second language or as a foreign language I agree with
you on that it's definitely a lifelong process of and learning any language is a lifelong process
yeah and mistakes are part of the process right we learn from from our mistakes and they learning a
language is so hard so maybe it makes us natural right and we have to be patient and kind with
ourselves and tell ourselves okay totally yes thank you so much to Rod for joining me today
and talking about accent reduction and I want to let everyone know that I will include a link
down below in the description box to Rod's channel and to a couple of videos on his channel that
I would love for you guys to check out and if you have any questions about accent reduction
or about learning pronunciation feel free to ask in the comments below and Rod and I will be happy
to answer them thank you so much and thank you for having me it was a pleasure yeah it's always
a pleasure to chat with you Rod thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us
and we will see you again soon thank you I hope so bye bye thank you everybody bye see you soon