Language Learning: Accent vs Pronunciation

In this post, you will know which is more essential for language learning: developing a good accent or good pronunciation? Most of the language blogs prefer authentic sound or native pronunciation. 

I don’t mean that having a good accent is not essential for language learning, or your decent pronunciation will not worth working on language, but it is not as vital as many language followers claimed to be. In this post, I tried to explain the difference between accent and pronunciation.

Pronunciation: It is your skill to pronounce words in a way that makes them clear to other language followers. One may have a good accent, but as long as they are clear to other speakers, they will often pronouncing words correctly. For example, a wrong pronunciation would be pronouncing ‘bad’ as ‘bed’. 

Accent: It includes your variation and tempo of speaking. It is something that makes you sound foreign. The typical accent means pronouncing words just like you pronounce in your native language, instead of pronouncing the words in their authentic way that you are learning and try to speak.

So, having good pronunciation is very important for being understood. If you have good pronunciation, people will understand you no matter whether you speak with a French accent.

The Disadvantage of Pursing Accent

Dedicated language followers are proud of their native accents in the foreign languages they are learning. It is also an exciting act. 

But, I think putting too much stress on the importance of the Chinese accent actually discourages language learners, as it scares them and develops a feeling of helplessness in them. 

If you are determined to be a native speaker and influence people with your remarkable language skills, then you should probably reevaluate your inspiration for learning a foreign language. To learn a foreign language successfully, you have to be innately inspired. 

Some people say that you may have to work on your accent and try to reach a native sound from the start of your language learning journey. Otherwise, you will learn bad habits that would be hard to leave. But I have an absolutely different view on this matter.

Before starting learning anything close to a native accent, I was good at French. When I was 15 years old, I spent 5-months in France to learn French. I came back with a pretty low level of confidence due to my offensively useless learning methods, it was a shocking accent. 

Focus on your Listening, not your Speaking

When I was learning Chinese, I was used to practicing listening to Chinese. I think, as long as you do frequent listening practices, your ear will naturally become used to the accents of the language you are listening and you will automatically have a good accent without extra effort. Once you reached the middle or advanced level, you can concentrate on specific sounds that you have trouble with and gradually decrease your accent. 

However, sometimes having a native accent in a foreign language is an advantage. In my experience, it is difficult to speak a foreign language 100% perfectly. You can usually make mistakes once in a while. If you have a native accent, you will sound stupid or illiterate when you make those mistakes. However, if you have a slight native accent but speak a foreign language very well, you are likely to seem educated and smart. But you have to effort very hard to learn a foreign language to such a high level. 

Final Thoughts: Accent vs Pronunciation

Here I want to say that it is worthless to consider too much about your accent. As long as you practice a language, you will become used to the accent, and then it will be so simple. Language is something you should frequently work on, and the time you spend on your practice will eventually better your language until you reached an advanced level.

If you have a different view on this topic, please feel free to share it in the comments below.