Listen to short audio tracks and focus on rhythm, breaks and intonation. Try to understand what gives the sentence its fluidity and try to imitate it. If you find it too hard, slow down the speed of the video or audio that you are watching most digital media players allow you to do this — you can even slow down YouTube videos.
This can help you identify and separate each syllable. If, on the other hand, your comprehension level is already quite good, you can challenge yourself by accelerating the speed.
This level of concentration is good training for all those fast-talking native speakers! For maximum efficiency, your training sessions should be frequent — no longer than two days between sessions and every day is ideal.
Collect newspaper articles, movie scripts and lyrics, and record yourself while reading them aloud. Then listen and analyze: What are your strengths and weaknesses? What native language habits are you carrying over to your new language? You can also ask native speakers for input. For example, you could upload your recordings to online communities like Judge my accent. The more you speak and the more feedback get, the better your accent will become.
Beamers for everyone! You get a beamer, and you get a beamer, and you get a beamer!!! You also get used to being misunderstood. A lot. So speaking slowly and intentionally becomes a way of life. Answers at the bottom of this section! Prepare yourself for coming home, accidentally saying ciao to someone, and then feeling really, really ridiculous. And neither will you. Welcome to the way of ciao. You can think of it as an extension of the Ciao effect. Now you have just one word to express the exact same sentiment.
What place do fancy SAT vocab words have in a conversation with a non-native speaker? Those words get tucked away in the archives of your memory and replaced with a couple hundred common words that you can use to express any idea to anyone. Basically, by imitating another person's gestures, body position, head tilt, voice modulation and, yep, accent, you're trying to make yourself look more like them, and hopefully seem less threatening and more likeable.
Hence why it shows up a lot in college students, who are trying to build their own social circle. It's thought to be a pretty ancient part of human behavior, and it's embedded deep in the brain. The responsibility for picking up on another person's actions and speech and imitating them falls to the brain's "mirror neurons," which have the explicit duty of subconsciously controlling our interactions so we resemble the people we're talking to.
Evidently, our cavemen brains feel safer around people who talk, look, and act like us, and mirror neurons are there to make it happen. Pretty fascinating. The accent imitation aspect of the chameleon effect has its own unique advantages. Speech pattern and modulation is a huge part of making ourselves understood, and various studies in accents have shown that imitating an accent subconsciously is actually a way to get your meaning across smoothly — which is a pretty crucial part of any social interaction.
A report by the Association of Psychological Science on the phenomenon talks about a Dutch study where volunteers listened to people talking in an unfamiliar accent, and then either wrote what they said down, listened again, or actually said it themselves while imitating the accent. The results? The people who'd done imitations — no matter how terrible they were — grasped the meaning of the other person's speech much more rapidly.
Boom: actual conversation achieved. The chameleon effect doesn't just make us easier to understand — it also appears to make us bond more. A study from the University of California found that imitating an accent subconsciously often comes from a desire to feel empathy with a person, or to feel a strong connection with them.
You're more likely to imitate an accent, in other words, if you really want to feel close to the person who's got it , and to share in their feelings. Hence why couples are likely to take on each others' accents with more rapidity than workmates or passing acquaintances. The problem with this, of course, is that accents are actually a pretty tricky thing.
Imitation, as everybody who's ever done it accidentally will probably know, can actually lead to social break-ups rather than more empathy and cohesion. Embarrassment is probably not what the caveman brain had in mind when it came up with the chameleon effect, but alas, it's sometimes what results.
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