I love your accent!
But, reducing an accent can allow you to be understood easily and to understand fast talking native English speakers, to feel confident, and un-judged. Accents identify the group we belong to and it can be beneficial to soften and change your accent to gain influence, and be persuasive.
So How to Reduce an Asian Accent?
Firstly, we must be realistic and admit there are right now 48 Asian countries in the world, and the accents vary considerably between those. So for the purposes of this article we will restrict our analysis to South East Asia. Within South East Asia our focus will be on India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.
These beautiful accents have certain features in common. They all have strong /D/ sounds and and short vowel sounds. They also all use a common tongue position for /N/ /L/ /T/ /D/ /TH/. They will place their tongue on the back of their top teeth and create high pressure while they block all air, then suddenly release. Can’t imagine? I’ll put a video to show you!
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The combination of short vowels and these tongue positions creates an unmistakable feature of the South East Asian accents.
What Should you Do??
The easiest thing you can do is practice stretching your vowels. Hooooooow caaaan IIIII dooooo thiiiis? It’s Eaaasy! Tryyyyy it righhhhhhht nooooow! This one change will make sure you are understood.
Next you need to practice a new tongue position! NEVER again will you touch your tongue on the back of your top teeth. From now on you will touch the tip of your tongue to the top of your mouth, behind the teeth but not touching. Practice this SLOWLY EVERYDAY for 1 min three times a day. Develop a new tongue position. Then you’ll be ready to start pronouncing those consonants differently. Not sure? Here’s a video
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Be confident, love your voice and succeed.