How to lose your accent when speaking English (Native Spanish speaker)

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Music in this video:
FINN by Rosé

Summer Vibes - Joakim Karud

Professor XV - Back at it

I'm in Medellin today to speak at the Seedstars Conference event.
But that's not what this video is about. This video is about the reason that I get to travel, and be the CEO of a cool tech startup.

A lot of that is because I can express
myself comfortably in English, and
English is not my native language!
My native language is Spanish, and I've been trying and worked most of my life to get rid of my accent... and thanks to the fact that I speak English, I got my first job which allowed me to pay for college,
which then allowed me to start my first company, and we did a Kickstarter campaign for that which was of course in English, and it then allowed me to start Slidebean, and then raise venture capital from US investors, and host the now somewhat successful Slidebean YouTube channel.

So I want to use this trip to talk about how I got rid of my English accent.

Now major disclaimer time: I didn't grow up in the US, I only came to the States for the first time when I was 21, I didn't go to any bilingual school or anything like that, no exchange programs. All my american accent training was self-taught.

I actually learned English in high school and elementary school on a 2-3 hour, a week system like most foreign speakers do. And education is, I believe, the first of four major cornerstones to really master a language.

The next cornerstone, I believe, is Immersion: so do your best to immerse yourself in the language that you're trying to learn.
Ever since I was a kid I've used all my devices in English, so this is this basic vocabulary, phrase and idiom training that you get to experience every day.

I believe it's just lazy to use your devices in your native language,
just use that opportunity to study and immerse yourself in the language that you're trying to learn.

It's like the easiest thing. Which brings me to my next point,
which is movies and TV. So I've always been a bit of a cinephile, and I think that you should always watch movies in their original language, and most of the time that language is English!

Easy hacks like doing closed captioning, you start to automatically, without any effort, memorizing how things are written. That also extends to pronunciation, vocabulary, idioms, and if you're like me that like to watch movies again and again, you're eventually gonna memorize some of that.

I remember when we were doing prepositions in high school, that the answer would come to me not because I knew the answer, or because I studied, but literally, because I remembered a quote from a movie that I loved, and that used that preposition in the correct form.

It's just been really useful. Which brings me to my last point. The last cornerstone of this is of course practice, so I get to practice and I speak English pretty much every day of my life, I run a New York startup I get to talk to customers, and to our team, and English has become this essential part of my life.

I'm thinking in English probably half or more of my day but I understand that's not the case for everybody, so that's where today's video sponsor comes in.

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So the company CEO Vladimir flew down to our office last week, and we had a nice discussion about the product, and the go-to-market stuff, but one of the most interesting facts is that they're focusing on high school students now. So they're finding high schools and say the United States, and connecting those students to students say in Costa Rica, and creating the sort of penpal type of relationship between students, where you have a friend abroad that teaches you
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.

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[kuchisakekitsune]

is not about the "accent" because everyone has one (even you), is about the ability to create an oral speech naturally that makes the difference.

[daisyrincon]

I feel like I sound good when I’m alone practicing but when I speak to people my accent comes out right away. How can I improve that 🙁

[d.av.s]

Nice video! I am Costa Rican. I have been married with an American girl for over 16 years and I have been living in the US for all that time. My Spanish accent never went away and I like it this way. I like to see people’s faces and reactions as soon as I open my mount. The thing is most of them tell me that I don’t sound like a person who’s native language is Spanish. They say all kinds of languages except Spanish and that cracks me up. Cheers and Pura Vida!!!

[yamilinsaurralde]

Super motivacional! I always suspected that, but your videos are sooo cool I got me wondered haha

[angieperez]

PURA VIDA!!!! Accents make us unique. I've spoken English all my life as I was born in NY but we moved to Puerto Rico when I was 8. At 25 I moved back to NY and I had gained a very thick accent. My first job in NY was in sales, in person and over the phone. I got hung up so many times. Practice did change my accent back to a "normal" american accent. I miss my thick accent sometimes lol. It is sad that we have to conform to changing our accent, when its from Spanish. When it's Australian or french, nobody makes you change it. I think it's because us Latinos are more comfortable conforming almost like we are ashamed, out of humility I believe. Australians aren't ashamed? Anyway just a thought. Caya I think you are awesome. Keep your accent...or whats left of it. Its nice!

[MCRoadkll]

Same way I learned English. Always was top of my class, all thanks to English cartoons and subtitling. (international) Gaming, etc.

[saulvasquez]

That’s awesome brother! I came to the US 6 years ago and I still have a sort of strong accent and I want to be able to improve it! I didn’t catch your accent at all!

[kimberlygardner]

Hey! Loved your video. I am an TESOL MA student giving a presentation on exceptional accent achievements of individuals who learned a second language as an adult. I really appreciate you sharing your experience--and a lot of your advice is supported by research! To respond to your challenge at the end, I would say that your accent is extremely native-like. There were only a few words where I noticed a slight accent--on a few of your words the stress timing was a little off (ex: Typically we say EXample, but yours was closer to exAMple) and you made some vowel sounds more tense than most native speakers would. (By "tense" I mean making the vowel a long vowel where the average native speaker would "schwa" /uh/ it, or making your lips tighter when you pronounce it ("Luke") as apposed to making them lax ("look")). However, please know that your English proficiency, especially given the age you started learning and the short time it took you to master it, is an absolutely amazing achievement!

[jwallah]

OK, you asked. So one quite subtle thing that you do that shows your accent is pronouncing some words ending with S with an S sound instead of Z. Like at the end you say "Please leave your comments." Native English speakers say pleez (like a Z at the end) not plees.



Also some of the vowels are a give away. Mostly you pronounce the word English like an American, but sometimes you have a longer E so it sounds like Eeenglish. You say at @3:26 "English has become an essential part of my life." Sounds totally American, the E in English is short and the S at the end of "has" is pronounced like a Z. But right after that you say "I'm thinking in Eeeglish more than half of my day."
That long E in English is a dead give away of some Latin accent.

[WilliJiang]

Great content, Caya! English is my second language too and I pretty much went through the same thing

[ar_p]

My native language is Spanish and even I can hear your Spanish accent sir.

[davidnichol]

Occasionally your a's come out as "ah" when it should be "uh" or "a" (as in "apple"), but I'm a polyglot who struggled in many languages to lose the American way of pronouncing a's, so I think that's probably a lot more obvious to me than most Americans.

That being said, I had no idea what you native language was, but I knew it was definitely something Romantic before I learned you were a native Spanish speaker.

[Tcarca]

You speak English amazingly well. I'm also Tica but I was raised in the States. Every so often I can detect a very slight accent, almost imperceptible. I just discovered your channel and enjoy the content. Keep up the good work! Pura Vida.

[saulopedro]

This is good content as always. However, I understand that even with an accent, if you speak correctly and people are able to understand you and if you can understand people well, then losing your accent is just a matter of letting people know where you come from.

My question is: If you speak good English, how much losing your accent will affect your ability to do business in the US?

[nitochi]

That's cool that you master the American accent on your own. I've been in the USA for 17 years, I was 19 when I came, although I understand everything, my speaking skills are deficient, I stutter, I can't have the right voice placement to sound more natural or similar enough to the American to blend in and sometimes I forget words and use fillers such as "like" "uh, uh", I hate that, it's frustrating. I working on it though, I'd like to find a coach.

[jwallah]

I thought you were American until a couple minutes into one of your videos, I was thinking there's a slight accent. Pretty damn good though. I'm American and I lived in Germany for a bunch of years so I learned German. Not as good as you learned English though. I always have an accent when I speak German (my son who grew up mostly in Germany likes to point out my mispronounciations) butI was always happy when they at least couldn't tell it was an American accent.



I think being a musician helps a bit and I'm curious if you're musician. But, I think it's really hard to make certain sounds in a language if you didn't grow up hearing it and imitating it. Also, there's sort of an extra problem for English speakers. In a lot of non-native-English speaking countries a lot of people still can speak English. It happened so many times where I speak German to someone and they answer in English because they here my accent, and sometimes their English was worse than my German so it didn't really help.

[MarioHernandez-nppb]

I didn´t hear any accent but I totally see the Casey Neistat influence in your video. Love you content btw. Saludos desde Honduras.

[mariasosa]

You still have an accent!
just like me.

[cdojoacademy]

A few thing said in this video can help you speak English but nothing said in this video will help you lose your accent. This video was basically made for the sponsorship

[pulangtuldok]

You actually speak more closely to the accent of upscale Filipino kids. You speak more clearly than typical American english speakers.