I disagree fundamentally with the premise here. An accent is simply someone applying the rules of pronunciation from one language to another. No accent is right or wrong but your product seems to imply that North American accents are desirable or correct while accents rooted in non-english languages are less desirable.
Instead of trying to "acquire an accent" why not focus on clarity of speech and pronunciation? If someone is unable to understand an accent, it is more often a case of that person not being exposed to differences in pronunciation which speaks more to the listener's lack of exposure than something wrong with the speaker.
Many regional accents from the UK are difficult to understand because they use non standard grammar, sentence structure and place stress and intonation differently.
I agree with the focus of most existing language learning - vocabulary and grammar are the foundation. Intonation and pronunciation are important. An accent is just top dressing - it is relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of clear communication. The goal should be clear communication, not a north american accent.
This hasn't been my experience. I worked with a man years ago that was relatively fluent in English, but whose thick accent made understanding him somewhat difficult. Listening intently was required to understand him and he would often need to repeat himself, even though he was using the correct words and grammar. It's something he ran into pretty often at the time and he worked to improve it. Something like this app may have helped him. Slight accents may be "just top dressing," but this is most definitely not always the case.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I invite you to watch one of our dialect coaches, Ron Carlos, share a bit about both the values and process that he brings to the table at BoldVoice (1:43 mins) - https://vimeo.com/572809188
As our name implies, we want to help non-native English speakers feel bolder and more confident when speaking English. To feel more confident, indeed, one may need to more deeply learn the rules of English grammar, and more varied vocabulary.
However, in the pursuit of more confident and clear speech, one may also want to learn how to adapt their pronunciation, how they place stress, how they use intonation and they way they use pacing and rhythm. All of these are the component parts of an accent.
A note from Ron (who just Slacked me while I was writing this): Clarity of speech and pronunciation are big parts of an accent. You can’t change those without changing an accent. We are dialect coaches. We love peoples’ native accents, which is why we use sounds and samples from each speaker’s familiar language to teach sounds in American English. We want to empower our users to be able to control their speech so they can choose when sound more American in situations where it may benefit them. We truly hope that one day accents won’t matter, but until then, we have folks who feel embarrassed about their accent which keeps them from showing up with their full selves. We’re here to help those folks feel more confident with their speech.
You have not addressed the fundamental point of my comment - why are you selling a north american accent in particular?
Clear speech is not predicated on acquiring a certain accent and i feel you are feeding into the stereotype of an accent determining the quality of the speaker, not the content of speech.
Edit - you ignore the fact that a native speaker of English may have an accent that is not North American. Think about millions in the Indian subcontinent or Africa. Are you not being subtly racist in implying that only accents from North America are desirable? Personally, i find many African accents incredibly clear and easy to understand.
This is the reason for my opposition to "accent coaches" - they focus on the wrong thing - the accent. To anyone with half a brain, D Trump sounds incredibly stupid despite his north American accent.
As a fellow immigrant working in the US and as someone working with non native speakers from other regions in the world, I can assure you this is not about racism. It is about team cohesion, clarity, getting things done in an international team. People have to spend extra brain cycles just to tune in to how you say things, before they can focus on what you actually say. This is especially true at the beginning of working with someone who's accent you have never heard. There is a big difference in accents between someone from India, France, Ukraine. While there is nothing wrong with that, it has value for international teams to mitigate this difference and settle on a common standard.
I like your point about cohesion. I'm not an immigrant here so, perhaps obviously, I agree. I have worked on teams and accents of those I have to collaborate with is a big factor in determining overall "friction". Often if the accent is too strong, it really makes the interaction dreadful because I (and others) want to understand you but it's difficult and embarrassing having to ask "what?" three times per sentence.
I don't think you need any better example than support call centers. How many people routinely avoid calling for support or simply loathe the idea of doing so because they're like to get someone with a heavy Indian, Filipino, etc. accent that leads to the scenario I mentioned above ("whats?")? When it comes down to it, it has a real cost in many ways.
Sorry for veering offtopic, but can you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot, in many threads. It degrades discussion and, as https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html explains, we're trying for something different than that here. Note this one, for example: "Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."
The main thing that would fix this is if you edit the swipes out of your comments, e.g. commenting on how bad the other person's point is, how they are nitpicking, how they are failing to argue properly. If you simply make your substantive points directly, without negative 'you' statements, your comments will be much better.
Also, please omit flamebait like the bit at the end of your comment here. It breaks the site guidelines too, and leads nowhere good.
The NA English accent is considered the most clear and easy to understand. This is not a controversial opinion and is held by virtually all non-native English speakers around the world.
Frankly there are billions of people who would kill to speak English like a native American. It’s about economics, not identity politics.
>The NA English accent is considered the most clear and easy to understand.
Do you have any evidence of this? I would believe that it depends strongly on the language(s) you already know. Perhaps you are confusing prevalence with clarity. North America has tremendous soft power - more so than any other part of the world and their accents are ubiquitous.
Clarity is not necessarily function of the accent.
As a French, the Amerian accent is usually the easiest to understand. That's also what most people around me think, though they also think of the British accent as more "fancy". This is for the "American you hear on TV" accent. which is also the one that I hear the most on Youtube or sites like that.
You're right about clarity not being a function of accent, at least not totally. There are some people that speak terrible English with a French accent, and others that speak clear and easy to understand English with a French accent. The same applies to pretty much every accent. I also agree with you on the soft power, however part of the soft power will mean that people are more used to the NA accent.
As a final point, I've heard multiple times that sometimes people that speak English as a second language can understand each other really well while Americans have a really hard time understanding them. If that's a real phenomenon, then having a non-American accent could be detrimental if you want to work in the USA.
American media (movies, news, etc.) is universal. People all around the world watch American shows and movies and are accustomed to the accent. This output dwarfs any other versions of English. So, to begin with, people are just more familiar with American English.
Adding to that, I’m not confusing prevalence with clarity. The standard American accent is clearer and easier to understand than most other variants, including American subcultural accents like the Boston, Texan, or Southern accents.
It is widespread common knowledge that the American accent is the easiest to understand. If you don’t agree with this, I’m sorry but you are not speaking from experience.
Can you identify any intrinsic property of General American other than media, business and language school familiarity that makes it particularly intelligible? Its pronunciation is as divorced from phonetics as most English dialects, it elides some consonants and vowel clusters that are distinct in most other English variants and it tends to be spoken more rapidly than some English dialects.
And yes, I have considerable experience of speaking English abroad, and whether I think the listener will understand me better if I exaggerate my British diction, adopt more General American-sounding syllables, pick up quirks of pronunciation and phrasing used in the local ESL lingua franca or pronounce a particular problem word as it is written is entirely situational, and generally based on what the person I'm speaking to is most exposed to.
> Frankly there are billions of people who would kill to speak English like a native American
Probably, at least in poor and undeveloped countries. But a lot of people would kill even more to speak with a posh British Accent, it's really hard to sound sophisticated when speaking American English.
> An accent is simply someone applying the rules of pronunciation from one language to another.
Exactly, and that is the wrong way to speak the "another" language. The ears of native speakers are tuned to a certain pronunciation, any departures from that will be harder to understand, it will be a distraction.
You might not like it, but that's how it is.
> Many regional accents from the UK are difficult to understand because they use non standard grammar, sentence structure and place stress and intonation differently.
True. It's also true that many regional or working class accents in the UK will impair your job prospects in the UK. It's probably better to come with a Swiss or Norwegian accent than a Geordie one, when applying for a job at Goldman.
> The goal should be clear communication, not a north american accent.
I agree with this 100% - mutual understanding is the basis of communication. Nevertheless, I don't think this the problem that BoldVoice is trying to solve here. While I'd love all my audiobooks to be read with a Glaswegian accent, North American one is what most people are internationally most familiar with. As a non-native speaker, being able to speak fluently with an accent that is highly desirable (at least within this century) carries not only practical utility but also social status if you consider the fact that this is someone's second (or nth) language.
Instead of trying to "acquire an accent" why not focus on clarity of speech and pronunciation? If someone is unable to understand an accent, it is more often a case of that person not being exposed to differences in pronunciation which speaks more to the listener's lack of exposure than something wrong with the speaker.
Many regional accents from the UK are difficult to understand because they use non standard grammar, sentence structure and place stress and intonation differently.
I agree with the focus of most existing language learning - vocabulary and grammar are the foundation. Intonation and pronunciation are important. An accent is just top dressing - it is relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of clear communication. The goal should be clear communication, not a north american accent.