What's the best way to reduce accent when learning Spanish?
I want to speak Spanish as perfectly as possible. I'm Brazilian and Portuguese-speaking, it's my first language. I speak English fluently as well. There is a close connection between Portuguese and Spanish, but I don't want to sound "Portuñol" when speaking Spanish. I have a special inclination to the Spanish as spoken by well-educated people in Madrid and Mexico City. I want to speak as someone who hails from Madrid or Mexico City. What have you guys done to reach the right and proper intonation and accent? What resoources have you guys used? What are the main features of the Spanish language spoken in those places?
1 Answer
This is a complex question for which there is no easy answer. However, I do have some tips that may help with enunciating with minimal accent.
First figure out the differences between the sounds made in your native language and your target language (in this case Spanish). Become familiar with the sounds of the Spanish dialect you want to imitate, and I suggest choosing only one. Madrid and Mexico City are significantly different accents that have different phoneme inventories.
Second, listen. Listen to native speakers of that dialect, listen carefully. Record yourself and listen to it next to native speaker productions of the same sounds. Equally helpful is getting feedback from native speakers of the dialect you want to speak accent-free. My wife is from Madrid, and as i was learning Spanish I constantly worked on this. I would produce an utterance, ask her if it was right, listen to her production of the same utterance, and repeat the process. Speaking is working the muscles of your mouth, and you develop muscle memory. Make sure you develop muscle memory producing the sounds the way you want to, don´t get into the habit of poor pronunciation, because that will be hard to break.
Intonation is also something that you can pick up from listening, but it is more complex. Learning about how stress is realized in Spanish will help, as would knowing stress patterns in Spanish (when and how stress is realized). I do not have the answer for you here, I would recommend looking for academic linguistic journals who talk about this, as I believe this resource will be hard to find elsewhere.
Finally, the bad news: you may not be able to do it. Some people work very hard at speaking another language accent free and are never able to come close. I don't know why, I'm sure it is a variety of reasons. However, I believe most people can improve their accent with patience, listening, and practice. Good luck!
