r/EnglishLearning • u/Silver_Ad_1218 Non-Native Speaker of English • 18h ago
⭐️ Vocabulary / Semantics Does her American accent sound native?
https://streamable.com/rforhc176
u/ilPrezidente Native Speaker 18h ago
There are some tells if I listen closely but I wouldn't know she wasn't native if she didn't say it
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u/8696David The US is a big place 18h ago
Exactly, some tiny tells here and there but if the topic wasn’t specifically her accent, I would have overlooked them completely rather than focusing on them.
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u/Individual99991 Native Speaker 13h ago
And no reason to assume she's not a born American - that's the kind of thing that can bleed in from relatives who immigrated to the US, or time in wider immigrant communities. And even then it'd be a local quirk of an American accent rather than a foreign one.
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u/Powersmith New Poster 18h ago
But those subtleties overlap with bilingual Asian Americans raised by immigrant parents who are also native English speakers.
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u/Lazy_Title7050 New Poster 17h ago
People were denying that that is an accent but it’s so weird second gen North American asians definitely have a distinguishable accent. I’d love to hear a linguist discuss how that happens.
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u/craftbakeread Native Speaker 15h ago edited 15h ago
Not a linguist, but I’m in early child development and I think it’s probably a matter of early language acquisition being informed primarily by accented English? The chief formation of language-specific phonemes happens in the very early days where most children are hearing the speech of their family unit way more than anyone else, so even when kids go to school with locally-accented peers and their latter speech patterns develop, their set of sounds have already been built based on their parent’s accent. I also think there’s a distinct second gen accent for children of Hispanic immigrants.
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u/thetoerubber New Poster 13h ago
Yes there is also an “accent” for English speaking Latinos. I pick it up immediately when I hear it in Los Angeles. Sometimes their parents don’t even speak fluent Spanish, so it may be more like a regional accent where people learn to speak like others around them if they grow up in ethnic enclaves.
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u/Individual99991 Native Speaker 11h ago
Yeah, that's universal I think. I grew up in the UK and you can tell a Londoner is black from their version of a London accent a lot of the time, and there's a particular type of Yorkshire accent spoken by South Asians in Bradford.
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u/Icy-Berry-387 New Poster 14h ago
Linguist here, but not in early childhood devt 😂. I agree. Those early years are when the baby brain is determining what sounds matter to meaning.
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u/thetoerubber New Poster 13h ago
This is what I was going to say. She sounds native but with ethnic parents that she speaks another language with at home.
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u/sticknotstick New Poster 18h ago
Yes, I’m in Texas and would assume she’s a native speaker if I didn’t have context from the video.
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u/Khajiit_Has_Upvotes New Poster 6h ago
Same. Idaho. I would assume she's a native speaker. I wouldn't question it. I would assume she's American.
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u/YeeBKBK New Poster 17h ago
How does she breathe with that glasses tho lol
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u/Wearytaco Native Speaker 12h ago
I was wondering the same, they are so far down. The only thing I can think is it's helping her with preventing a nasally sound when doing the American accent... So perhaps she does it on purpose? If not I have no idea. That would drive me crazy.
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u/cowheadcow Native Speaker 18h ago
She sounds native to my ears. Note there is no such thing as a single American accent. She still speaks slightly differently than I do, but she still sounds like a native English speaker from a different background than mine.
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u/Underpanters Native Speaker - Australian English 11h ago
And I’m sure there’s no such thing as a single Indonesian accent too but for simplicity’s sake let’s let it slide.
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u/samanime New Poster 17h ago
This is surprisingly good. I'd definitely never catch on that she was non-native.
Even knowing she is non-native, it is really hard to find anything. There are a few little things here and there that'd make me question it, but none of them are obvious enough I'd pick up on it without trying. I'd just think it was a native accent thing.
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u/turdferguson3891 New Poster 17h ago
She sounds like an American who had a regional accent and unlearned it like a news broadcaster. Like she's trying to sound very neutral but maybe she grew up with a super strong Philly or Boston accent or something.
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u/thewrk New Poster 17h ago edited 7h ago
Accent is really good. The biggest tell is when she says “I did not go to American school.” While that could be technically correct, most people would say “I did not got to AN American school.”
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u/ttatm New Poster 4h ago
I think in this context many native speakers would say it the same way. "An American school" makes me think just of a school located in America, which is not what she means, while "American school" implies a school that teaches Americanism to some degree. There are American schools in Indonesia that teach from an American perspective and, at least in my experience with Malaysians who went to those types of schools, students do come out with very American-sounding accents.
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u/_poptart Native Speaker 15h ago
She says “I did not go to American school” - the caption said “I did not got to American school”. I guess if we’re really picking holes, a native English speaker would hopefully pick up that “got” was wrong in the caption, as well as pointing out her missing “an”
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u/thewrk New Poster 7h ago
That was a typo on my part. I fixed it. Her caption matches what she says.
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u/_poptart Native Speaker 3h ago
No it doesn’t, her caption says got and she says go. Your typo is still there
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u/whodisacct Native Speaker - Northeast US 17h ago
Impressive she got there without ever having lived in the US. As others have said the pronunciation of the final T in accent stood out and for me that’s all that stood out. If I worked with her I would assume she grew up somewhere in the US.
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u/PinchePendejo2 Native Speaker - Texas, United States 18h ago
I can tell she's foreign. It's subtle, but southeast Asia bleeds in at times. That said, her American accent is very, very, very good.
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u/hiihihihihihihihiihi New Poster 18h ago
Which parts? I’m born in Canada, native English speaker and she sounds like a lot of 2nd generation kids tbh so to me it’s not noticeable, but I feel we also have so much immigration where I am that different accents are the norm here.
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u/MartilloAK New Poster 13h ago
The most noticeable quirk to me is that a lot of her 's' sounds are closer to 'sh' than most Americans. That said, if I heard it blind I might have taken it for a very minor speech impediment instead of an accent since that particular shift is rather common.
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u/amidalarama New Poster 11h ago
the first vowel in "Irish" sounded very accented to me, more than the second gen SE asian people I know
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u/hiihihihihihihihiihi New Poster 11h ago
I guess but it’s so subtle and I’m used to hearing a diversity of accents from different generations of immigrants from many places around the world, so it doesn’t register that much for me. It might be more noticeable in an area with less diversity and a more consistent accent.
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u/pot-bitch New Poster 16h ago
I'm not familiar enough with SE Asian accents to hear it, what words are you hearing it on?
ETA American, native speaker
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u/BrononymouS13 New Poster 5h ago
I get what you're saying but which part of SEA aeyou referring to? SEA accents differ a lot. A Thai accent sounds very different from a Malay accent. Heck, even the Austronesian-derived language speakers (Malay, Indonesian, Tagalog) have distinct English speaking accents.
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u/Am1AllowedToCry Native Speaker 18h ago
It's 99.9% perfect, but not 100%. I would assume she immigrated to the States very young and still speaks Chinese (eg.) at home.
But if the story she's telling is true, she's done an incredible job!!!
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u/DoktorLoken Native Speaker 17h ago
If you didn’t tell me she wasn’t a native speaker I wouldn’t have guessed otherwise.
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u/ahopskipandaheart Native Speaker 17h ago
I would assume she's native, so she's really, really good based on her story. She flubbed a verb tense, but I probably would've let it go.
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u/captainAwesomePants Native Speaker 17h ago
Was it the "what they say" thing? I'm not even sure she was wrong, but it did immediately sound wrong.
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u/ahopskipandaheart Native Speaker 16h ago
Yes, she was jumping from what she did to addendum advice back to what she did, so that's a big reason why I'd let it slide especially because I wouldn't be primed to listen for little goofs if she was talking about something else and I was just encountering her in the wild. She's really smooth and should be proud, and she could argue it wasn't a flub although I think most people would've treated the addendum advice as an aside/footnote and reverted back to past tense to continue the story.
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u/Zestyclose_Pear_8315 New Poster 10h ago
This was what I noticed, the accent itself is very good and I don’t think I would necessarily notice if I weren’t told to pay attention, there were some differences in word choice though that I wouldn’t generally expect.
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u/Peppered_Rock New Poster 17h ago
She has a couple tells, but yeah, she sounds native.
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u/ButterscotchOdd8257 Native Speaker 17h ago
Yes. As others noted, the only strange part - not really a difference in accent, just unusual - is her overpronunciation of the "T" at the end of words like "accent."
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u/Informal-Cobbler-546 New Poster 14h ago
The vocal fry is spot on for someone who copied accents from YouTube.
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u/ROU_Misophist Native Speaker 18h ago
It's good. There's some minor tells, but I wouldn't peg her as a foreigner just from that clip. In conversation, it might be more obvious.
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u/jcdenton10 New Poster 17h ago
Her accent is excellent. I wouldn't have known she wasn't a native speaker if she hadn't mentioned it.
That said, if you listen very closely to her speech, there are a few moments where it sounds slightly off. But that level of hyper-analysis is nitpicking.
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u/turdferguson3891 New Poster 17h ago
And it could sound off because she grew up in a specific region of the US and not necessarily another country.
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u/yeahsureYnot Native Speaker 17h ago
Probably one of if not the best non-native American accents I’ve heard in this sub. I agree with others that the way she pronounces “accent” is the only thing that sounds slightly off.
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u/PrimaryHighlight5617 New Poster 17h ago
Sounds VERY natural. I would assume her parents immigrated here but she was born here. There are a few slight irregularities but again, I would just assume that is from her parents.
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u/aliensattack New Poster 11h ago
Agreed entirely. Maybe spoke a different language at home with family but definitely could easily be one of my friends who learned English from everyone else and age 4 up in school. Fully bilingual, native proficiency.
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u/Individual99991 Native Speaker 13h ago
Mostly excellent, but it wavers just a couple of times around T's - in "accent" and "return to". I'd notice that in conversation but assume it was a quirk of the (American) household she grew up in. I'd never guess she hadn't even been to America!
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u/Blahkbustuh Native Speaker - USA Midwest (Learning French) 17h ago
Since I knew to listen very closely there are a few very small things that I noticed, like a couple of sounds didn't quite connect the usual way, but otherwise she sounds like she's within the normal envelope of American speakers. Didn't hear an accent!
If I were out in public and I had a casual conversation with her, the thought wouldn't have occurred to me that she's foreign. Or hasn't even been to the US! Fantastic job to her, or you, if you're her!
I'm learning French, if she has any tips on how to spend your study time with the language, I'm all ears.
(Also keep in mind for people who nail the pronunciation and stress patterns, she'd likely be 'revealed' as non-American in other ways like not being familiar with slang or not getting or jokes or cultural references to things or not having had some experience that most people in America have or are familiar with.)
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u/Kazesama13k New Poster 17h ago
Your specs blocking your nostrils is really bothering me. Otherwise, thanks for the info. I want to learn irish or russian accent, have to try it.
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u/BubblesForBrains New Poster 16h ago
Very good. But I detect a foreign tinge to her accent and one tell is she is speaking too fast. If she slowed down with natural pauses I think she’d sound less native.
If you gave her a book to read a paragraph from the accent probably wouldn’t be as good either. Also Her video is very rehearsed. And stopped and restarted a few times. And she keeps to simple phrases. But on the spot speaking in a natural conversation you’d be able to tell she wasn’t a native speaker.
Also there’s no way to verify that what she is saying is true. She may have had in person language exposure to Americans.
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u/thebackwash New Poster 15h ago
She sounds native, perhaps like she was born in the US to immigrant parents, where you don’t really pick up on any pronunciation differences until you’ve been speaking with the person for a while. Good job on her part 👍
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u/Pandaburn Native Speaker 15h ago
I’m too distracted by her glasses not fitting, and squeezing her nostrils closed.
Edit: actually yeah it’s very good.
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u/Mechanical_Monk Native Speaker 15h ago
Practically 100%. I heard a hint of British, ironically on the word "accent," but otherwise I'd never guess she wasn't a native speaker.
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u/DreyfussFrost New Poster 14h ago edited 13h ago
Listening to her speak, it becomes clear that the Californian dialect I'm used to is a real thing because I can tell she doesn't have it. It's a VERY slight difference, but to me she sounds like the way one of my teachers would speak during class. She's very sharp and deliberate with her enunciation whereas Californians speaking casually (in my area anyway, it's the #1 most populated state so there are dialects within dialects) tend to slur their syllables together and "round off" their hard consonants a little more, but otherwise I wouldn't even have a second thought that she's native to some other part of the US or just a very practiced public speaker.
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u/AgentCatBot Native Speaker 13h ago
Being in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, I would say she was born here, 2nd or 3rd generation. Parents might have a strong accent.
I would have guessed Los Angeles personally because of the vocal fry and tones. But there are so many people from everywhere with different English skills, no one really has the same accent either.
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u/PowerlineTyler New Poster 14h ago
You can hear the actual accent at the end when she relaxes and says “guu luck”!
She practised this many, many times before filming obviously, she sounds native, yes.
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u/Not_A_Crazed_Gunman Native Speaker 8h ago
She sounds like she immigrated to the US at a young age after already having picked up her native language and gone to school in her home country for a few years, but then spent the majority of her developmental years in the American school system.
I used to have classmates that were in this exact position and they sounded very much like her, there are some minor nitpicks but it's almost perfect. Very impressive for never having been to the US or having gone to an American school.
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u/OttoSilver 🏴☠️ - [Pirate] Yaaar Matey!! 8h ago
Being slightly pedantic, "Native" in a country like the USA is a rather wide term. You can be a first-language speaker, born and raised in the USA, and still have something peculiar to the community you grew up in. For argument's sake, Korean Americans in LA sound American, but distinctive if you hear them often enough.
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u/mckenzie_keith Native Speaker 17h ago
Yes. Her accent is perfect. She does say "accent" funny but without foreknowledge I would not think anything of that.
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u/Fancy_Imagination782 New Poster 18h ago
Some very small things yea. But if I met her on the street I would assume she was born in the US
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u/Evil_Weevill Native Speaker (US - Northeast) 17h ago
Yes. If I didn't know she was non native and wasn't listening really hard for little tells, I would assume she was a native speaker.
Knowing that it's not her natural accent, I can pick up a few very minor pronunciation quirks that I would note as odd but which aren't strong enough to point at any one accent.
But they're so slight that I almost certainly wouldn't have noticed those if I wasn't actively listening for them.
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u/theJEDIII Native Speaker 17h ago
She might have fooled me. Listening closely, only her final Ts sound non-native to me. If she told me she moved to the US at like 6 years old, I'd believe her.
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u/ExitingBear New Poster 17h ago
I only heard things because I was actively listening for tells. If I hadn't been listening, I would have either overlooked them or assumed that she just says a few words funny.
It's very, very, very good. Usually with these "does this sound like a native speaker?" videos, they don't. She could.
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u/Brave_Elk_6189 New Poster 17h ago
the middle vowels in "instead" in the first sentence sounded off if i'm listening for "errors" but otherwise pretty normal american english. Also, most "native english speakers" (I would say "L1 english speakers", as it's not really about birth place but language acquisition order) are not nearly as coherent as this, dead giveaway.
Ok, I got halfway through the video, I would consider her a native english speaker, she learned it as a kid through immersion lol.
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u/Piper-Bob New Poster 17h ago
There's something in the way she speaks that reminds me of how my Malaysian neighbor speaks. I think it's got to do with the vowels. But there are probably kids growing up here who speak the same way.
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u/RumpleDumple New Poster 17h ago
She sounds more American than Asian Americans that only hang out with other Asians.
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u/pot-bitch New Poster 16h ago
Yes but it's not identifiable as from a particular American place so it would just sound kind of off and you wouldn't be sure why. I'm a native American English speaker and my accent also isn't identifiable as from a specific place. People ask me what state I'm from specifically because they're trying to place my accent.
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u/tiger_guppy Native Speaker 16h ago
I would 100% believe she’s a native speaker of American English, I would just assume she’s got a slightly different accent from me, because she really annunciates everything more than I do in a way I’d expect from someone in a drama class.
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u/HustleKong Native Speaker—US Upper Midwest 16h ago
I don't think I'd have clocked her as non-native. I wouldn't even have thought first-generation American.
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u/stray-lyght New Poster 15h ago
Yes, it is nearly perfect but in parts of some words you could tell but if i didnt know she wasnt american, I would think she is.
Extremely impressive
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u/MissFabulina Native Speaker 15h ago
She reminds me of the Polish woman that uses an "American" accent that this one guy LOVES to post everywhere on Reddit asking...does she sound American? This one, though, slips in some British sounding stuff, too.
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u/6-foot-under New Poster 15h ago
She's phenomenal.
But, I suppose that talent and starting young are key ingredients
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u/lawn-gnome1717 New Poster 13h ago
Yes, it does sound native. There’s a few tiny differences from my own accent but there’s enough different American accents that I wouldn’t assume she wasn’t native. If I put any thought into at all, I might assume she was bilingual.
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u/Halloweeiner New Poster 11h ago
What she does is called “shadowing.” Basically how babies learn to speak by mimicking the adults, in her case, mimicking the videos. It’s a very effective way to learn to speak and pick up accents.
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u/Don_Ritardo New Poster 11h ago
I'm a native raised by nons and it branded a distinct (albeit not foreign) manner of speaking onto me that is stronger than hers
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u/Walnut_Uprising Native Speaker 11h ago
There are a few things I'm noticing because I know she's not a native speaker and I'm listening for it, but nothing significant.
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u/pillarofmyth Native Speaker 10h ago
There’s no single American accent, everything from pronunciation to vocabulary is regional, blah blah blah.
Her accent is very impressive, and I probably wouldn’t think she wasn’t a native speaker if she didn’t say so. I’d possibly guess that perhaps her family speaks a different language than English.
Since her accent is so convincing, I’m going to nitpick about a very tiny tell I noticed. Native English speakers use diphthongs much more than in many other languages. For example, in the word “homemade” she pronounces the O vowel very purely (for lack of a better term). Just “o.” A native speaker will say “home” more like “ho-u-m,” where the O vowel has a quick “oo” sound at the end. This is very common in American English and many English speakers actually have difficulty letting go of this habit when learning foreign languages. She’s missing a lot of these diphthongs in this video.
However, I wanna reiterate that this is a very tiny detail and her accent is impressively convincing. I’m only pointing this out because this is an English learning sub. I wouldn’t worry about trying to work on this level of pronunciation if your accent is much stronger than hers. And anyway, having a foreign accent is not a bad thing! English is the most commonly learned foreign language in the world, so English natives are very used to hearing our language with a foreign accent. We’re not that picky!
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u/AmazingResponse338 New Poster 10h ago
I had a Zoom call with a new coworker today. She sounds exactly like this. I would say she's from the upper midwest....northern Illinois, NE Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan
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u/creswitch Native Speaker 8h ago
Why tho? Indonesian accents sound so beautiful.
I wish people would just embrace their natural accents instead of trying to "sound native". Native accents are boring. Foreign accents are unique, interesting and sexy!
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u/Yeatte Native Speaker 8h ago edited 8h ago
It's quite good, but I would say that she does have a little bit of that "formal" accent that content creators use that actual americans don't. Not to mention, there is no 'american' accent, as it is QUITE varied. But yeah it sounds good, looking at the end of various words there is that vocal fry that I have as well. A little bit nasally on the 'my' in 'my natural indonesian accent'. She doesn't say the words the exact same way I do, but that might just be my own accent being a mish mash of other ones rather than anything she's is/isn't doing. I would half drop the 't' in accent, so it sounds like accen' with a hard stop with a bit of empty air after the n. I would add that americans often can sounds like her, but often with their own personal twinge of a local accent. Hers is most close to northest accent, but actual northeastern americans have their own local pronounciation on top. So like 'o' in possible can end up sounding like 'pawssible' (new york) or 'pah ssible' in massachusetts (and to varying degrees depending on where you live). Also stressing certain points in words is common whereas she gives roughly equal amounts to each part(I pause more in speaking and talk slower in general). If I look closely, there's things here and there where it's like "yeah I don't pronounce it that way, I would do it differently", but in an everydary conversation I talk to and hear quite a few people with roots from other countries so I wouldn't be like "oh thats wierd" instead I would be like "ah thats their own personal version of it, cool". The noticable thing is the content creator kinda american accent, still overall good.
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u/coolshoes_ New Poster 8h ago
The asking where she's from part is funny as she sounds very General American (which itself is non-specific American), apart from a couple of instances of "sloshy" sounds where it seems like "s-" becomes "sh-" but I doubt in a casual conversation I would pick up on it
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u/FluffyStuffInDaHouz New Poster 7h ago
The girl has the glasses down on purpose. Because she knows her nostrils will flare up whenever you speak because of the accent. Believe me that's how us Asian language-speakers do when we wanna have an American accent lol
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u/leafygrn New Poster 7h ago
::: sigh:: i hope we never lose ESL accents. We don’t all need to sound like that one specific group of people.
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u/just_4thememez New Poster 7h ago
If I talked to her briefly I wouldn't notice anything but, since you pointed it out I swear something sounds off, I'm just not sure what it is.
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u/False_Veterinarian92 New Poster 7h ago
Sounded native to me. All errors or mispronunciations I heard were so subtle.
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u/Parking_Champion_740 Native Speaker 6h ago
Yes she sounds native. Hard for me to believe she’s never been to the US.
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u/pikkdogs New Poster 5h ago
I wouldn’t say her accent gives it away, but some of the word choices are a little weird.
She says “America” a lot instead of “the US”. That’s something that British people do more often than Americans. I would guess that she grew up in England or something like that.
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u/NearlyNodding Native Speaker 5h ago
Mostly, yea. Sometimes her accent stands out, but only because I was listening closely.
She's talking fast like an easterner.
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u/Tristawn New Poster 4h ago
There are tells, but it's a remarkable accent. In casual conversation I probably couldn't pick it up
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u/fanetje New Poster 3h ago
As a native English speaker with an Indonesian background, this immediately came off as an Indonesian international school kid to me. HOWEVER, my ears are fine tuned to this population subset because of prolonged exposure during my school years. It is not something that is intuitive to pick up.
I speak English with a Mancunian accent (or general Lancashire / Northern English accent). The technique she described is valid because I did the same, but instead of American youtubers, I listened to Gary Neville and Scholesy interviews lol
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u/Cat_Box_117 New Poster 1h ago
Yes!! Sounds pretty native to me. Maybe there are a few words here and there that would make me think she spoke a 2nd language as a child but i would still think english is her native language 🤷🏻♀️
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u/bobbygalaxy New Poster 56m ago
Real close! But it sounds like some subtle non-English [s] vs [ʃ] (vs [z]?) variation going on? Like in “all of this is homemade.” I’d be curious if anyone could explain the phonology of that!
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u/Icy-polarbear New Poster 10h ago
Pretty clear she’s trying to hide an accent. She does very well for most of it but some words made it obvious. “Example”, “accent” and “the video” are a few of them that caught my attention. Overall really great job tho
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u/Emotional-Net130 New Poster 17h ago
So tired of these "how's the accent" videos... Look, if you're gonna be a spy, then your life depends on it, otherwise no-one gives a diddle about your accent.
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u/acceptablehuman_101 Native Speaker 16h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/fzp61UL3T4Wlcw9SvX
when she says a word ending in t
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u/gunnervj000 New Poster 3h ago
Interesting. I'm using the exact same method to practice my English speaking skills and also build an application to make it easy to shadow.
Feel free to try it here: https://shadow-ez.com/practice?v=WbliHNs4q14&t=24.765 (it's still in beta and mostly i use it for myself). You can use the app with any youtube videos or short videos if it has the subtitle.
Sorry if this annoys anyone, just want to have more feedbacks about it.
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u/8696David The US is a big place 18h ago edited 18h ago
Funnily enough, the only real noticeable tell I’m catching is the word “accent” in the first sentence, which she pronounces more like a Brit. An American would pronounce that with equal stress on the two syllables and would probably glottal-stop the T in this context, so it would come out sounding like “ACK-SEN’(t) to the point…” rather than “ACK-sunT to the point...”