Live Accent Training: What Is Fluency? Set Realistic Goals!

What does it mean to be fluent in a language? Should one of your goals be to lose your accent in English? I briefly discussed this question with a new student of mine from India. You'll get to meet him very soon. If you're new to my channel, welcome. I'm Jennifer and I teach American English for confident, effective communication. If you'd like my digital downloads to boost your fluency, Alright, Nitish, I'm so excited to work with you. So I just want to say thank you for trusting me to guide you. Thank you. I want to thank you as well for giving me the opportunity to directly come on the call and learn from you. Awesome. It's a pleasure for me as well. Right. We're going to have a great time. So, I first want to tell you, I think you're already very, very fluent, in my definition of fluent. But all of us can improve fluency, native and non-native speakers alike. Let me ask you a question. What do you think fluency is? For me, fluency is something, if you can talk about something without hesitation in your mind. Clearly. If you can put your thoughts across clearly, without thinking about it twice or thrice, you are fluent enough. Yes. It's about communication. Ease of communication. So I like to tell people, my job is to help you, my desire is to help people speak confidently and effectively. And the confidence comes from that ease, that lack of hesitation, as you said, putting your thoughts together, but putting them together for effective communication. So you want to be as accurate as possible because you want people to understand you. So I kind of see fluency, not kind of, I do see fluency as communication, being done well, so that you understand what people are communicating to you and then you communicate what you want to others and they understand what you mean. So it's about being seen and heard as we want to be seen and heard, right? And I think everybody has to work on communication. Everybody has to work on finding the right words. And we all make grammar mistakes, it's okay, but as accurately as possible, we try to communicate our ideas. But then we get the element of pronunciation, right? Everybody has some kind of accent. The question is, if you speak English as a second or third, whatever, how many languages you know, is that first language influencing the way that you're speaking English to the point where it's difficult for your listener to understand? So in my opinion, and you can agree or disagree, I think a wonderful goal is accent reduction, but not accent elimination. What do you feel? What do you, like, I want to understand, like, see, I have already been working on accent reduction. I actually want to speak like sound like American so that people I'm communicating with is more easier for them to understand me clearly, since I work in the US market only. My question to you is that when you say accent reduction and not accent elimination, what do you exactly mean? Like, what are the current difference? Do you have, do you, excellent. Do you have to eliminate your accent 100%? No. You can still have some influence from your first language and still be very fluent and very successful in whatever you choose to do with your English. So you don't have to lose your accent completely. The accent that is being influenced by your first language, which is Hindi, right? And that's already amazing right there because Hindi and English are so very different. The fact that you can go back and forth between the two of them blows my mind. You're amazing. Your brain is amazing. So you do not have to eliminate all traces of that accent in order to be understood. We just agreed that fluency is ease of communication and you can do that with a bit of an accent. It's just if you start getting away from the range of what people can understand, then we have communication problems. And it totally makes sense to choose more of an American accent as your model because you're doing most of your work with people in or somehow connected to the US or North America in general, Canada included. And that's a factor. But in general, some people study both. And I hear like this blend of American and British English, for example, and that's fine too, as long as people understand. So I love to really clarify, what are we aiming for? We're not aiming for you to sound exactly like me. That's not the point. But I hope that I'm a good model for you and you can gain clarity because you want to be accurate and you want to be understood. You're putting your ideas together already very well. Right now, one of our goals is to reduce the influence of Hindi. Nitish very nicely defined fluency as being able to talk about something without hesitation. He said that being fluent means you can get your ideas across clearly and put your thoughts together easily. I added to that and talked about being confident and effective. Part of your accuracy involves pronunciation. I'd like you to reflect on what fluency means to you. That's all for now. But before I go, I'll ask you to hit the like and subscribe buttons so that you don't miss any of the lessons I have planned for you. If you'd like live interaction and feedback, then join my English with Jennifer community on Patreon, where we practice all skills for confident, effective communication. The link is in the video description. I hope to see you again soon. As always, thanks for watching and happy studies!