Have you ever had a conversation with someone and they just couldn't understand you? If so, it's easy to lose confidence. You might even avoid speaking. When this happens, you might build insecurities about your pronunciation or your accent. This can be frustrating and affect your self-esteem.
But is having a native accent really a necessary goal to have? One thing to understand is that there is not just one native accent. Even the UK has many different accents and some can be quite difficult to understand. In fact, the majority of English speakers are actually non-native speakers.
So, to be understood, you don't need a perfect native accent. What you want to aim for is something called intelligibility. This means how well you can be understood by different speakers of English. It's about communicating effectively and clearly.
At the BBC Learning English speaking confidence workshop, we showed some English learners different English accents. They found that the accents were quite similar and easy to understand. This shows that it's not about having a perfect native accent, but about being able to communicate effectively.
So, what can we do to make sure we're communicating effectively? Try to find people with lots of different first languages to practise with. And if you do have a situation where someone doesn't understand you, ask them what it was that they didn't understand. You'll quickly learn what parts of your pronunciation might be causing confusion.
Lastly, try not to take it personally when someone doesn't understand you. Maybe they just didn't hear you. And that's it for now. But if you enjoyed this video, make sure you check out the podcast episode, where you'll hear more from experts about this topic.
