“When I moved to England for the first time, I really wanted to sound like a native. I felt very strongly that my ability to speak without my native accent was the one and only goal to aim for. I wanted to be part of the crowd. I thought people would judge me if I didn’t – that they would comment on it or think I was less capable because I couldn’t speak ‘perfectly’, just like them.
I was doing my degree and I wanted to sound like an ‘educated’ person.
I found it hard to speak at all because of that. I would prefer one-to-one situations where there was only one ‘judge’ of my accent – if anything went wrong, at least there’s only one person hearing it. In big groups, I tended to be a listener. Or I would make friends with other non-natives – at least they wouldn’t always know I had my accent.
Then something changed when I moved to France for my year abroad. I stopped caring about my accent. Thinking about it now, it’s probably because my stay in France was so temporary – just a year, so if I made a fool out of myself, I’d be out of the country and nobody would judge me again. So I really went for it and pretty much became fluent in my third month there.
The two years before that at a British university seemed more permanent and perhaps that’s why I used to care about my accent so much. When I got back from France, though, I became much more confident, I started to speak in class, speak in front of groups, I became more sociable. I even performed in a student theatre play as one of the two main characters!”
So, as you can understand from the above, having an accent is OK. It’s actually nice when you hear someone speak another language with a hint of their own. It’s part of them – it’s part of their personality and their uniqueness. It makes them interesting.
If your ambition, though, is to sound more like a native speaker of the language you’re learning, that’s OK too, but remember – doing something is better than doing it perfectly. Speaking a language at all is better than not speaking because you feel self-conscious about your accent.
