Most people who feel like they have “an accent problem” actually have a short list of specific, identifiable habits — a couple of consonants, a vowel pair, a stress pattern — hiding behind a much bigger, vaguer feeling of being generally hard to follow. Finding the specific list is most of the work in this course; fixing it, once found, is usually the easier part.
Do this now. Record two minutes of yourself talking about something you know well, unscripted. Play it back once for a general impression, then a second time listening only for moments where you’d expect a listener to need a beat longer to catch what you said. Mark each one, and note whether it was a particular sound, a stress pattern, or a word ending.
Don’t judge the list yet, and don’t try to fix anything while you’re building it. The next several lessons cover the most common categories — stress, connected speech, specific consonants and vowels, word endings, intonation — and you’ll be able to place most of what you noticed into one of them.
Keep this recording and this list. Lesson ten turns them into your own plan.
