2022 in Review and the Accent Amazing Roadmap for 2023
Happy New Year, accent and pronunciation enthusiasts! No doubt 2022 was the year of revival; it gave us a chance to get back into the groove of things and start working on our accent hopes to build ourselves again. This year might be considered a year of development, diligence and dedication. It certainly was for me. I worked on a great variety of projects old and new, and more is yet to come in the next year.
Releasing my first video course
This year I released my first ever video course: Complete English Pronunciation. Containing every single English phoneme as well as the most common accent problems. This course helped students speak more comprehensibly, so they would never be misunderstood again while speaking English as the main goal, containing 84 video instructional videos and 369 audio recordings.
This will pave the way for my upcoming courses, serving as the basis before students work on more specific accent problems in courses tailored specifically to their language background. The first one that’s coming up is the American Accent for Speakers of Russian video course next year. I’m very excited for this and subsequent tailored accent modification courses that I will create. While the first course took many months of hard work to film, edit, and produce, the current course I’m working on is taking considerably less time thanks to my streamlining of the course production processes and knowing what works and what doesn’t.
Continued linguistic research to improve my teaching
This year, I taught around 1000 classes to students from 30 different countries (according to the iTalki statistics they release at the end of the year). Among these include students from Romania and Czechia where I coincidentally also lived for about a month each. I also learned a bit of these languages while there on Duolingo, helping me understand the phonetic structure of these languages so I can teach my students better. Perhaps this is why these new students sought me out! Students often do find me because I know a bit about their languages and how they differ from English.
I also have a predilection for Slavic languages, often spending time in place that speak Slavic languages such as Poland and Croatia. Slavic languages are similar enough to each other such that learning any new ones often doesn’t take much effort, especially since I am fairly conversational in Polish, Russian, and somewhat in Croatian. Czech, therefore, wasn’t too difficult. I may also learn a bit of Ukrainian too, since I have many students from Ukraine, although so far none have been monolingual in Ukrainian but rather bilingual alongside Russian and materials for monolingual Russian speakers also have helped my Ukrainian students with their English.
In the future I will probably learn other languages as I live in countries that speak those languages. Asian languages such as Korean and Japanese, as well as my heritage languages of Mandarin and Cantonese are on the roadmap but for now I will be focusing on Slavic languages.
Participation in the 2022 Polyglot Gathering
In June this year, I also I had the honor of presenting a talk at the 2022 Polyglot Gathering, the largest gathering of polyglots, linguists, and language educators in the world. Here I also got a chance to talk freely and passionately about topics like etymology, linguistic change, and crazy grammatical patterns.
My talk was on improving one's pronunciation and accent by listening to the accent of speakers of your target language when they speak your language. The idea is that because you know what sounds native and what sounds non-native in your native tongue, you can listen to any deviations from the “native” accent when speakers of your target language speak your language and these deviations can give insight into how your target language functions. A very simple example is how Arabic speakers may pronounce words with the /p/ sound like a [b], making “popcorn” sound like “bobcorn”, telling you that the sound [p] does not exist in Arabic.
As I gave the talk on the last full day of the conference, so by that time I had got to know the linguistic backgrounds of the participants which assisted me to engage my audience even more. This was a great experience and I hope to participate in more conferences in the future.
Besides this, I also learnt cool things related to my target languages in various talks. At these talks I learnt things like how the old Warsaw dialect sounded, how stress shifts in Polish, as well as the allophonic realization of Polish nasal vowels, all while improving my Polish since the talks were conducted in Polish!
The Accent Amazing Roadmap for 2023
Starting next year, I want to start releasing video courses on the general American accent tailored to speakers of different language backgrounds with examples from those languages. I will tailor the materials so that students can learn with examples from their own languages because learning by analogy is always easier than learning from scratch.
I will continue to do linguistic research on phonetics and phonology into different languages, especially the most common languages among my students. In particular, I want to create more ways to tailor class material and content for my students. In fact, I’ve created several Facebook groups with tailored analyses of materials which you can find here for Speakers of 汉语/廣東話, русский, polski, español, português, 日本語, 한국어.
I also want to innovate and create new ways to get students to practice and new types of practices! I want to make sure my students take more of the lead next year in developing healthy practice habits and ability to practice outside of class. Practice is the only way to improve and so I will continue to research and innovate new ways to help you develop these habits and get the accent of your dreams!
What about you? What are your goals? Let me know in the comments, on my social media, or just DM me to let me know!
Have a great holiday season and in 2023, let's get ready to make your accent amazing!