How I Got My American Accent

Please make a video about how you have come to this level of sounding very native. I'm sure many of your fans including me, want to hear your story.

native. I'm sure many of your fans including me, want to hear your story.

Thanks in advance. Well, thank you so much for your question. I did work quite a bit on my American accent, so I'm going to tell you exactly what I did.

Before I get into that, though, I want to mention a couple of things. First and

foremost, changing your accent or adjusting your speech to a different language, to a different way of pronouncing things has some sort of psychological effect on us. It can feel quite unnatural, quite uncomfortable

and that's normal. It's like when you start going to the gym and your muscles start hurting, and then you're like "Oh, this hurts. This hurts. This

hurts." It's because you have been doing some movements that you're not used to that you haven't done before. And because this feels like an effort, we are working with some muscles in our jaws here and our tongues and

everything. It does feel like it is harder to work on an accent or

everything. It does feel like it is harder to work on an accent or pronunciation. So, a lot of people choose not to do those things and not to

pronunciation. So, a lot of people choose not to do those things and not to work with the muscles cuz that's what changing an accent is. You have to make some different movements with your muscles around your mouth on your face.

So, a lot of people choose to maintain their native language mouth and pronounce the English words with the same native language mouth. For example

the word cat. Cat. If I said it in my Romanian native mouth, it would sound like cut. Cut because that's how I read C A N T. For some other languages, it could be

like cut. Cut because that's how I read C A N T. For some other languages, it could be cut because the mouth doesn't open right? So it doesn't go as cat, right?

But it goes cut cut because that's what that mouth is used to. So there's this misconception that if someone's trying really hard to sound American, they're trying to become American and they don't want to lose their identity or they

don't want to lose their culture or their language. Which brings me to my second point. The fear of looking like you're pretending to be someone else or

second point. The fear of looking like you're pretending to be someone else or that you want to become someone else. Many people think like if I'm not American, why should I try to sound like one? And that's not a problem in itself

if that's a choice. Like if that's a conscious choice, like you make it a point that you don't want to change the way you sound. You don't want to have a perfect American or British or Australian accent, that's fine. But if

you want to improve and you want to actually integrate and sound American then you have to let go of this irrational fear that you are pretending to be someone else. Honestly, that's a little bit true. Like you are about to

change your facial expressions, the way you open your mouth, the melody of your voice, the tone, your reactions to certain things, what you say in certain

situations. However, I can guarantee you, you're a smart person. So, you're

situations. However, I can guarantee you, you're a smart person. So, you're

not going to lose your identity or your culture. You're just going to improve it. You're going to take whatever you love the most from your culture and

it. You're going to take whatever you love the most from your culture and you're going to add whatever you love the most from a different culture.

Therefore, you're just going to become a more open-minded, rounded person. That's

all. You just have to trust yourself a little more on that. Okay. So, let's

start with what I did exactly to get my American accent to where it is today.

It's going to be a long one, so please grab a coffee or any other non-alcoholic beverage of your choice and sit back and relax. Okay, so this is going to be a

little bit of a timeline situation. So let's start with 7 years old, 1997. So

one day when I was seven, I turned the TV on. There was a tel nolla soap opera TV show uh situation on TV. Um, it was called Sunset Beach and it was about

these like, you know, beautiful people running around on the beach saving people. There's lifeguards there. I don't know. I think it was in somewhere

people. There's lifeguards there. I don't know. I think it was in somewhere Santa Monica, somewhere in California. I don't know where the action was happening, but me being from Republic of Muldova, from a tiny village um, in you

know, a very kind of rural area to see that was like, whoa. Anyway, so

obviously it was an American show. So I started watching it and and started getting infatuated by the way they spoke and I started imitating them. I started

pretending I'm one of them. For some reason I started to also imitate exactly how they were talking. Like I was rolling my Rs. I was watching their mouths to see what were they doing. So the sound comes out the way it did. I

would notice the this. I would notice the nasal sounds and kind of like the deeper sounds, the way they open their mouth really widely compared to how I was talking in Romanian. So, I was kind of absorbing little words, little bits

and pieces. The show was translated in Romanian, so I would or there were

and pieces. The show was translated in Romanian, so I would or there were Romanian subtitles, so I would listen to English and kind of see what that meant uh without knowing what the words actually looked like written in English.

I only knew them by sound. So then in second grade in 1998 when I was eight years old um we had to choose a foreign language to start learning in school. So

our school offered French and English and we had to choose between these two.

My parents chose English because they kind of noticed already that I was into English. So might as well. Maybe many of you don't know this, but in Republic of

English. So might as well. Maybe many of you don't know this, but in Republic of Muldova and in many European countries learning an a foreign language is a mandatory subject. It's not something that my parents chose to put me in or it

mandatory subject. It's not something that my parents chose to put me in or it was an extracurricular curricular activity. No, it was just part of the

curriculum. So, it was 30 people in our class or 28 or something like that. 30

curriculum. So, it was 30 people in our class or 28 or something like that. 30

or 31 and somewhere around that number. And English was just like math or Romanian or physics or any other subject. Well, not physics in second grade, but um just like whatever basic subjects we had. It was maybe once or

twice a week. It we had it with a teacher who was I think Ukrainian that had moved to Muldova. She had a good accent, but it wasn't perfect. Let's

just say that. So, when we started learning English in school, I had already been kind of practicing at home. So, for some reason, I just imagined that I knew things. And then we would learn first the basics, you know, the

numbers and the fruits and veggies and body parts and all of that. But then we would start obviously moving into some word groups or some sentences and just

kind of doing our basic, you know textbook English. But then I would take that and I would go home and I would keep doing my imitation play with my shows and then I

would connect the knowledge that I had gotten from school with what I was saying. So then I started recognizing these patterns like oh okay plurals oh

saying. So then I started recognizing these patterns like oh okay plurals oh okay he she gets s at the end of the verb. Um, so little things like that

that started to make sense in my head. However, there was nobody for me to practice with. Nobody in my family spoke English. I had no friends who spoke

practice with. Nobody in my family spoke English. I had no friends who spoke English. The only person that would speak English decently was our teacher.

English. The only person that would speak English decently was our teacher.

And we barely spoke in class. You know how it is. But I was slowly starting to get obsessed with English, with American English. So when I would come to school and we had to read, I don't know, a sentence or something, I would roll my

Rs and I would open my mouth and kids started making fun of me because they were like, "Oh, look at her, the American." But jokes's on them because a year later, everybody started coming to me to ask for help with their homework

to ask for my notes and whatever else they needed to copy my answers at tests.

So they wanted the American to help them. And here's an interesting fact here. Whenever someone came to me asking for help with their homework, uh, for

here. Whenever someone came to me asking for help with their homework, uh, for example, what tense should I use here present perfect or past simple? I could

have just given them the answer like use this, but no. I was like, okay, well let's look at it. What do you think you should use here? They were like, bro just give me the answer. And I was like no, no, no. Like, let's see. Why are we

using present perfect here? And then I would ask them questions and then they would actually start thinking and then I would make them get to the right answer.

And then I was like, hold on, do I like teaching? So going back to my attitude towards learning English and my accent. So a few years down the road, I was learning English in school. I wasn't speaking much because it's just a normal

old school traditional teaching method. So then I discovered these little tricks and little tools to make my pronunciation better and my accent a lot smoother. Things like tongue twisters. And I thought they were pretty funny

smoother. Things like tongue twisters. And I thought they were pretty funny because the more you said those things the more melody you learn. So then I realized like, oh, English accent and pronunciation is not only about the

words and how to pronounce each word like in an isolated way, right? It's

about how you connect them. So then I learned about okay connected speech because when I was listening to the actors talking in these shows they

wouldn't stop after each word right like we would read a text in English class and kids would actually break after every single word and it was very

robotic so then I was like no no no that's not how they talk though then tongue twisters repetition and connected speech kind of started to slowly become

a part of my learning even though they weren't necessarily part of the curriculum like nobody was talking about these things at school. So I took these

things and I continued my mirror talk right like I was imagining that every single conversation every single thing that I would say to anybody in my life

would be in English. Like if I was mad at my mom, I would answer to her in my head. Like I would talk back to her in my head, but in English. If I had like

head. Like I would talk back to her in my head, but in English. If I had like some beef with someone at school, I would imagine that I would like tell them off in English. If I I don't know I wanted to share my opinions about

something, I was doing that in English. And a lot of the times I was either whispering or talking out loud when I knew no one was around um or talking in front of a mirror or like mouththing like pretending I was talking. And then

I would go back to school, get a little bit more knowledge, but it got to a point where I was kind of going a little bit ahead of the curriculum and of the textbook and I thought, you know whatever we were studying wasn't enough.

So then I was really really happy when we had a couple English teachers coming.

Well, they weren't real English teachers, just Peacecore volunteers coming from the US to our village. Um they were Americans to teach us English.

And they were like 23, 24 year old people, very young people who would uh just have a couple classes with us throughout the week and then they would do some little activities like hiphop dancing or basketball and then obviously

you would have to talk to them in English. So we had like a little bit of exposure to a real native speaker. It was so eye opening to me because I was like, "Oh my god, this person talks just like the people in the movies." So, it's

not just it's not fake, it's real. This is how they talk. And then I would listen to my teacher and I was like, I don't think that's the best source for

me to learn. So, I was kind of a terrible student because I would correct my teacher or I would kind of like make little jokes. I feel bad about it. I

shouldn't have done it, but I was a kid and I just, you know, I thought that I'm the But up until that point, I think the biggest realization, the biggest thing that I learned was that in school, we only focused on

grammar, on some vocabulary words that we didn't really need, and a lot of written information, a lot of written work. There was no talk about melody there's no talk about tone, there's no talk about connected speech, there's no

speaking activities, there was no practice activities. They It was just reading and writing. Anyway, so I was a good student. I was getting good grades.

I was going to all these like national contests or whatever. Maybe not national like district maybe. So I kind of developed this illusion in my head that I was really good at English, right? And I kind of was in a school from a school

perspective. So I graduated high school. I went to university and guess what? No

perspective. So I graduated high school. I went to university and guess what? No

I did not apply to an English major or something related to English or languages. No, I applied for economic studies. I applied to be an accountant.

languages. No, I applied for economic studies. I applied to be an accountant.

Clearly, you can see that was not my calling. That was not my true vocation in life. However, in that first year, I discovered this work and travel program

in life. However, in that first year, I discovered this work and travel program which allows you to go to the United States for a summer and work there. And

usually the jobs are in hospitality, um either restaurants, hotels, uh amusement parks and stuff like that. So I begged my parents to help me out and to come up with the money cuz it was quite expensive. Um and I went to the States

and the agent that I was talking to uh before going that set me up with the job was like, "Your English is so good. You're going to do amazing. like there's

not a lot of people with such good English coming out of high school. And I

was like, "Oh yeah, oh yeah, America here I come." And then uh my job was uh a line cook in a seafood restaurant in Alaska in a very small fishing village.

Um and needless to say, I was I I had like a rude awakening of how badly I knew English actually.

and not speaking it cuz I would speak it decently. People would understand what I would say, right? But it was the listening part that was terrible and the

actual change of a setting, right? I was in a fastpaced environment. That was my first job ever. Um, I was in a foreign country. I didn't think to learn kitchen

vocabulary. I didn't think to learn what's a lid. There was like a lot of

vocabulary. I didn't think to learn what's a lid. There was like a lot of different um tools and equipment in that kitchen that when they would ask me to bring something, I would freeze. Like and I was so ashamed to ask what it is

because I knew it was something simple. I I literally cried for the first two weeks. It was so hard. It was so nerve-wracking on my feet for I don't

weeks. It was so hard. It was so nerve-wracking on my feet for I don't know 9 10 hours. My shoes would get wet from all like the water and like there were there was oil everywhere. It was just not a great environment. I didn't

feel like the best English student anymore. Anyway, I got better towards the end, but then I made the decision that I have to come back, not to Alaska but go back to the US for another summer somewhere else, somewhere warmer where I

would make a little bit more money. I would travel. So, that's what I did. I

went home, graduated from accounting and then I decided to apply for a master's degree um just to be able to go to the United States again because I had to be a student. However, I picked a major that made sense this time. It was

translation and conference interpretation in English. And it was a lot better because all the activities and all the curriculum and everything would be kind of focused around translation and not only written translation, but conference

interpretation. It's like simultaneous translation like you hear me talk and I

interpretation. It's like simultaneous translation like you hear me talk and I have to translate at the same time and that's really hard and we would do actual practical activities and I I loved that. That challenged me a lot. So

while I was in my masters I was also offered an English teaching job like a part-time English teaching job. Actually I wasn't offered it. I applied for it.

Um I wanted to uh to get a job to make some extra money. So I applied, I got hired and I left for the states for a summer. I worked as a bartender at this

time. So my accent improved so much more because as a bartender you have to talk

time. So my accent improved so much more because as a bartender you have to talk to people, you have to talk to your uh colleagues, you have to talk to your

customers continuously like it never stops. Now, the fact that I was surrounded by native speakers was great but I couldn't really understand a lot of the things they were saying to me. I couldn't understand their jokes. I

couldn't really understand their references. I couldn't understand, you know, their like comments and little notes on things. I I would just kind of like pretend I was laughing. I'm sure most of the times I wouldn't, you know

my reaction wouldn't match with what they would say. Um, and yeah, it was kind of awkward, but listen, I'm not from here, okay? You got to adjust your

speech to me. So, it was quite difficult to do a job because not only I had to learn how to make cocktails on the fly because it was just so quick. I had to there was no time for me to go and check a book. I had to like remember all the

recipes, take the orders, punch them in do all the payments, make the drinks you know, talk to whoever else was around me because we had like bartender

assistants, uh, talk to the guests in front of me who were watching. Not only

that, but I was also focusing on, you know, catching what they were saying in a way that enhanced their experience because that guest sits at the bar and they want to be entertained. They want to talk to you. They want to have a good

time. They don't understand that you're like struggling and you're trying to do

time. They don't understand that you're like struggling and you're trying to do like a million things at once. they just feel like, you know, you're a pro and you can handle it and you're there for them and you are in a way, but you're

also doing a million other things. So in a way, I wasn't at that time consciously trying to work on my accent but I had to because I would listen to what people would say and then I would kind of mimic what they would say

right? I would just continue that imitation game. You have to remember at

right? I would just continue that imitation game. You have to remember at that time when I was learning English, I didn't have a phone. I didn't have internet like right when I was 12, 13 14, 15. And a lot of people think like

"Oh my god, it took you so long to get to this level. I, you know, don't have that time. I don't want to invest this much time." You don't have to invest

that time. I don't want to invest this much time." You don't have to invest this much time anymore. You have you have this that is so valuable that has

so much in it. You have apps for everything. You have AI for everything.

You can find people to talk to, real people, native speakers to talk to at any time of the day or night, right? I didn't have any of that. So, you can cut

my timeline, how long it took me to learn English into probably like five.

So, you only need a couple years. So you're good. So, I left the US. I went

back to Muldova. I continued teaching English. Um, I opened my own school. And

then uh four or 5 years later we decided to go to Canada. So in 2018 we arrived as permanent residents in Vancouver British Columbia. Now my English was

good at this point, right? Because I had studied it, I had practiced it, I had taught it, right? But when I arrived to Canada, a lot of people like I would say one sentence and they'd be like, "Oh where are you from?" And I was like

"Hold on. I thought I had a really good accent. I went to the US twice. People

"Hold on. I thought I had a really good accent. I went to the US twice. People

were like surprised by my English. Oh, I thought you were from here. That's what

they were telling me." But in Canada people were like, "Oh, where are you from?" And then it was so funny later, I was watching some of my stories from

from?" And then it was so funny later, I was watching some of my stories from 2018 on Instagram. And when I was speaking English and I was like, "She has an accent. I can hear it now." So in Canada, yes, I was aware that I had

an accent, but I didn't really know exactly what it was, like what the issue was. So, I wasn't really consciously working on it. I was just kind of like

was. So, I wasn't really consciously working on it. I was just kind of like going with the flow. I got hired um at a restaurant. I started serving, then I started uh or then I got promoted into restaurant management. So then I had to

learn kind of like a different side of English which is more professional, more polished kind of business English, not super corporate, but I was dealing with guests with issues. You know, you were kind of a representative of a company.

So I had to observe and learn how people were communicating. So, I had to upgrade my vocabulary a little bit, my expressions, the way I communicated some things, both pleasant and unpleasant. I learned how to choose my words

carefully. I learned how to provide feedback. Anyway, that's a whole another

carefully. I learned how to provide feedback. Anyway, that's a whole another video. The point is, I elevated my English because of this job. And if

video. The point is, I elevated my English because of this job. And if

you're an English learner, you know this. You're always kind of paying attention. you're paying attention to what people say, how people say it, what

attention. you're paying attention to what people say, how people say it, what exactly, you know, what is the expression they used, what is the word they used. You're always kind of aware of how people talk. So then in 2024, we

they used. You're always kind of aware of how people talk. So then in 2024, we left Canada. Now I'm traveling. I'm speaking English to people from different countries, not

left Canada. Now I'm traveling. I'm speaking English to people from different countries, not English-speaking countries, right? And it's not really about how perfect other

people's English is. It's about how you connect to people. And accent is important, yes, because you want to be clear. You want people to understand

you. Because let me tell you, I've had some difficult situations. Accents are

you. Because let me tell you, I've had some difficult situations. Accents are

not the most important thing in learning a language. As long as you are clear enough so people can understand what you're saying, so you can connect to them, you can communicate with them, you know, you can have um a conversation.

And even though I teach English and I have all this experience, I still have an accent and I'm trying to improve it by practicing English a lot. Like these

videos that I do, um, you know, going live on TikTok, doing all these lessons with my students. This is me practicing too. It It never stops. Learning never

stops, right? So, if a native speaker would hear me, they would say, "I have an accent." Um, if someone who's learning English and they're at the

an accent." Um, if someone who's learning English and they're at the beginning, they would think I'm a native speaker, right? It's all about perception. The important thing is as long as you keep practicing, you're

perception. The important thing is as long as you keep practicing, you're going to be improving. You know, I still do tongue twisters every day, I still try to whenever I watch TV and I and I see a word that I didn't really know how

to read before, how to say before, then I practice it. Like for example, um hierarchy. Hierarchy. I used to say hierarchy or something, you know, and

hierarchy. Hierarchy. I used to say hierarchy or something, you know, and then I hear it and then I'm like, oh hierarchy learning never stops. Anyway

thank you so much for watching. I'm going to be posting a lot more kind of like story vibe videos and just kind of explaining a little bit more about who I

am, why I'm here. Obviously, I've had my TikTok for a long, well, not a long time, but a probably a year now. So, if you came from there or if you follow me there, um, you know some of these stories, but I feel like here on

YouTube, I have a lot more time to ramble and yap. On top of that, I'm planning to post a lot more complete English lessons here. So, yeah, if you want to keep up with that, make sure you follow, not follow, subscribe, you

subscribe here. Okay, love you. Bye.

subscribe here. Okay, love you. Bye.