Best English Accent - Speak Like A Native Speaker - PLACEMENT

This is a line from later in this video. If you can improve your

placement

, you will immediately sound more natural every time you

speak

English. I've been making American English videos on YouTube for 11 years and this is probably the most excited I've ever been. I've ever been on video, there is one thing that affects the sound of the voice when a non-

native

speak

er speaks American English more than anything else and it really affects whether someone sounds American or not, their location, maybe you've never heard this one. word. Before, not many teachers talked about it and I will say that it is one of the most difficult things to teach, but today we are going to talk about it.

We will use a mixing engineer and a scientific article to understand what

placement

is. Here is a sample of what we will explore hello hello, I asked the mix engineer to change the location thanks sendai mike, let's get into the details of all this, but I want you to know that almost all of my students need to work on their location , no matter what your

native

language is, by the end of this video you will understand what location is and you will be able to change it to unlock a more natural American voice within you and remember if you like this. video or learned something, be sure to like and subscribe with notifications.

Thank you all. Several months ago I asked you to send videos of yourselves saying a dialogue so I could use your examples to teach here on YouTube. Thanks to all the examples in this one. The video, including the one you already heard, came from you, and by the way, if you didn't see last week's excellent video where I used your videos to teach about American English pronunciation, be sure to check it out. Location affects overall. voice quality almost all my students the collocations are too high no matter the native language chinese japanese korean vietnamese thai arabic hindi spanish portuguese french and so on the natural production of these languages ​​is different from

english

so i found a mixing engineer here in youtube who could play with voice formants in a minute we're going to talk about what that means, but first I just want you to hear the difference, so he took the person we heard whose native language is Chinese and changed it. the formants hello what do you want to do tonight hello what do you want to do tonight the first is her voice as she recorded it the second has a different quality because mike played with the formants of the sound what do you want to do tonight what do you want to do tonight ?

So she took my voice and did the opposite, we'll call the student we're working with here. He took V's voice and played with the formants to make it have a more American quality. he took my voice and did the same thing in reverse to try to make the quality of my voice reflect the quality of her voice. What do you want to do tonight? What do you want to do tonight? What do you want to do tonight? What do you want to do tonight? Changing formants really changes the quality of the voice. Don't you hear my whole mini conversation with that formant change?

Hey, what do you want to do tonight? I don't know, I feel like just watching TV, sure, so what? It's a formant and how your voice changes so much is not the pitch, the pitch or the fundamental frequency is the same the vocal folds vibrate in one pitch those are two different vowels in the same pitch why did they sound different because of the shape of my mouth the position of my tongue was different the position of my lips ah what the vocal cords did did not change the pitch was the same but the quality of the sound was affected by the shape of the vocal tract which affected the sound part of the sound called formants of Performance is frequencies of sound above the fundamental frequency, that's the pitch, if this feels a little technical, stay with me, the payoff in this video, what you're going to learn to do with your voice, is going to be huge, okay , then the vocal folds create the fundamental tone and the shape of the vocal tract forms the formants.

Formants are what make different sounds, since my pitch stays the same, but they can also affect the quality of the vowel, so you may or may not sound very natural speaking American English. It's very natural depending on what's happening with your vocal tract, so you may know exactly the position of your tongue, lip and jaw for an American vowel, but if the rest of your vocal tract, your throat doesn't have the correctly, you will never be able to understand the American vowel. quality of that vowel so we can change the shape of a sound by changing the shape of the vocal tract in a minute we'll tell you what you want to do to sound more American but we can also change the formants by recording a voice and have a sound mixer playing with it.

I'll let Sendai Mike explain this further. He is a recording and mixing engineer in Seattle. Then we'll look at many more examples from real-life students so you can start finding the right shape for your own vocal tract. Most of you are probably familiar with pitch shifting. Pitch shifting, especially downward, has become very popular in hip hop and rap music, so pitch shifting is when you change the fundamental frequency of your voice and we'll talk about that. about using that to sound more natural in this video, but for now let's hear about formant shifting. Now changing the format is similar to changing the pitch, but the difference is that when you format the audio, you change the note and I refer to the note as the note you would play on. a keyboard stays the same but the pitch gets deeper or higher depending on the direction you are sending, so if you format the send you could sing a constant note and it would stay in key as you shape it, move up and down, okay, he made a lot of formatting changes and that's what he did before with v's voice and mine so we could really see how it affected the sound and made the sound thinner or heavier and as we'll see In the students who go to Estudio, most people have a sound that is too thin.

I have been in contact with some students at my academy who recently brought up the idea that they had to use a different voice, which I would say is shaped differently than their vocal tract. In order to speak American English, a student said that one of my American friends told me that my presence and voice do not match that of Americans, my natural Japanese voice is quite high, so the tone of American English is usually a little lower than my students want to do and the location, the sound quality affected by the formants is also lower.

Another student said that his advice to keep the low location in mind has helped me a lot. My native language is Russian. We came to the US seven years ago and unlike I, my son learned the American

accent

very quickly, every time he heard me speak in English he would wonder why I was changing my voice to a higher pitch and I did not do it. I just used my Russian voice coming out of the front of my mouth and it didn't sound very good so I was making all the American English sounds tongue position lip position with mouth open but the rest of his vocal tract had the form that you would use for Russian so that made your American English sound higher and thinner because in American English we have lower collocation so how do you get lower collocation?

Let's look at a scientific article. I am going to put the full name of the article and the authors in the video description to understand this article, let's do a very quick anatomy lesson for the voice. This will help you figure out what you need to change in your throat to sound more American. The vocal cords are here, they are the ones that vibrate and create the fundamental frequency or pitch when the air rises. your trachea, ah, your pitch changes as your larynx, which is a larger thing, moves in a way that causes the vocal cords to change in tension or thickness.

This kind of thing, think of it like a guitar string, makes a different sound depending on where you put your finger. on it when you pluck it, as you affect the length of the string, so the air rises from your lungs through your windpipe, vibrates your vocal cords and creates your fundamental tone, but the key to changing your sound is knowing that your larynx here is also called voice. The box can be moved by the complex series of muscles in the neck that attach it to the bones. It can be moved up or down. It can be moved forward.

It can be moved backwards. And all these things don't affect the tone because that's the voice. strings but the formants affect the other sounds above that frequency and those formants are what will give you an American voice or not to have the correct shape of the vocal tract to sound more American you want a larynx or lower larynx your The native language may have the larynx in a slightly different place in the throat, which will change the way you sound, so if you think about a wide open neck, I think that helps my students release the neck muscles, which then helps the larynx or the pop-up voice box and that gives your vocal tract the correct shape for the American location since we're here, let's talk about some other things that can affect your sound, we have these open cavities in our mouth and then our nasal cavity and an open cavity is where the sound will vibrate and change the quality, so in American English none of our vowels are nasal vowels, which means that here is our hard palate, our palate, there is also a soft palate and when raises prevents air from rising. in the nasal cavity, but when it's down, the air can go up and it can change the sound, so ah it becomes the soft palate closing or rising is also very important in where your voice vibrates, where it is your location, we want to avoid nasal vowels in American.

English, but the main takeaway from the article is that your larynx should be in a low, relaxed position to give your throat the correct shape for American English. You want to release the muscle tension in your neck to try to get your larynx to lower and find that correct location with a raised larynx a sound with the same fundamental frequency will sound thinner and less resonant and that's not what we want to match American quality we want it more warm and more resonant the main reason for this perceptual effect is that the larynx rising can cause an increase in the frequency of the formants, which gives the sound a different quality, so in your own native language you have the pitch, the fundamental frequency that is natural to your language, you have your articulators, tongue, teeth, lips that you use to shape and create the different sounds of your native language, but you also have the shape of your vocal tract that affects the formants of the sound and , therefore, the quality of the sound, and most people when learning English learn and think only about the tongue position of the articulators. lip position for a sound, but if you don't change the shape of the vocal tract of your throat and use the shape that is natural for your own native language, then you will never have a truly American quality to your voice and that is why it works in Placement immediately at Rachel's English Academy because why work on all the sounds if you haven't worked on the overall quality of the voice first?

That's what we're going to do here today, we're going to work on overall quality. The quality of your voice affects how you sound every time you speak English. If you can improve your placement, you will immediately sound more natural every time you speak. When I work with a student on placement, what I do is this: I ask them to say something in English, anything. and then I try to imitate them, I imitate their location and I alternate between that and a more American location and talk about what I'm changing. What you should do as a student is use your ears to notice the different qualities of sounds and then play with your own voice tense in some places relax in some places think about being wide and low try to find as many different types of voices as you can okay , let's start with a student that we're going to come back to v us In fact, we're going to come to the desk so we can see these students together.

I feel like just watching TV. I feel that I feel that I feel that I feel that I feel that I feel that I feel that one thing I want to say is. we should all imitate together try to imitate the students and try to imitate me imitate the students and try to imitate me when I'm in a more American location imitate and play with our voices and try to match things is the

best

way to find a new location I think I feel like just watching TV I feel like I feel like I feel like I feel like I feel like I feel like I'm trying to place that very high here I feel like I feel like I like to do that, one of the things I do is apply a little more pressure here on the front of my throat.

I feel like it helps me throw it more into this part of my face. I feel like I feel like it and if I let that go there and then it allows me to lower my location. I feel like now I want to say that I think your pitch is a little higher than what would be most natural for American English. I feel like I can be. I feel that I feel. like just watching TV, so my tone is lower now, it used to be when I worked with students. I would say don't worry about your pitch, its placement, it's the sound, the formants,but then I realized that yes, they are two separate things, but often by lowering their pitch, their fundamental frequency helped with the overall tone because all of those frequencies were lower as well, it gave them a warmer tone and that's really what we want.

Also, I think that, in general, many people's natural tone for American English is a bit. high, so lowering the pitch can bring the fundamental frequency to somewhere that's a little more natural, but it also has that nice effect of warming up the voice more, so try recording yourself saying something, just listen to the phrase and listen to it so many times. times you have the melody in your head and then try to tone it down a little. I feel like uh uh uh I feel like ah I feel like you can do something by sliding down to try to find a lower pitch and you know, go as low as you can ah I feel like you're probably not going to talk from there, but the more range you find, The more you'll be able to play with your voice and find something that's comfortable for you, so for Vivian I had to try it. release a little tension in the front of my neck, I can't say that's exactly how she makes that sound, but I do know that if you think about a wide open neck and let things sink in, that will probably help our next the student's native language is Hindi I feel like just watching TV just watching TV just watching TV just watching TV just watching TV just watching just watching me the place where this can resonate is very narrow just watching just just just watching just watching it is all Here, oh, and if I let my throat and my neck relax, it opens up this part down here and allows the voice to go down and just allows more room for resonance, so again it reduces and releases the tension more. up in the throat, ah.

I feel like just watching TV, that allows the location to go down. Another thing I tell my students at the academy is a couple of things you can really think about if your mouth is here or I have an exercise where I make them feel like their chest is really there. a

speaker

where the voice comes from and has no mouth, but going down in your mind with your imagination of where your voice comes from can also help release tension above that point, so it could be an exercise for you. To try lying down, close your eyes, visualize that mouth, inhale and then speak, and really in your mind observe what's going on in this mouth, you might find that it helps you release some tension that you didn't even know you had. on your neck our next student's native language is Russian Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Hey, what do you want to do tonight? Hey, what do you want to do tonight? Hey, what do you want to do tonight? all the places in my body and my throat that could vibrate it feels like I've crushed them hey hey hey and it feels forward on the face in the nose hey and very small that way we want to open that hey hey One thing that sometimes I tell my students to do this, hey, hey, opening up is really thinking about releasing the muscles in the back of the neck. Ah, sometimes I almost tell them to almost even think about there being a kind of weighted blanket. of lowering things to counteract tension and lifting things hey, hey, hey, are you practicing out loud?

Try to find both sounds. Hey, hey, it's not just about jaw dropping, but you might notice that I'm jaw dropping. try what you can, see if you can find those two different sounds, the pitch is the same, the sounds are the same, it's the formants in the throat in the rest of the vocal tract that make them sound so different. The native language of our next student. It's Ukrainian I feel like watching TV I feel like watching TV I feel like watching TV I feel like watching TV I feel like watching TV I feel like watching TV I feel like watching TV tv tv tv for that I have a kind of small resonance pocket here and then also one on my nose tv tv I want this column of connection through everything tv tv I want to always feel that everything is connected to this anchoring root here ah, this is where the voice is produced I mean, it is produced in the voice in the vocal cords here, the larynx, but we want to use our imagination to bring in more of the body, lower it, get that warmer residence, resonance tv tv tv tv you know when I imitate other students.

They often have to visibly tighten things in a way that they don't to try to bring the tension inward, so this can be something you can play with, even if you know, you just try to loosen things up and find that things are really relaxed. because what causes attention mainly are internal things that we cannot see, not external things like the articulators and I discovered that when we talk about relaxing these things that we cannot see and that we do not know much about it, it works well to use the imagination, as I said , the mind's eye.

I have a couple of exercises here in the academy where I guide my students through a guided relaxation exercise just to try to find that place where they can reset. You know, sometimes when students are practicing something, they get tense and the more tense things get, the more the location gets out of control, so just taking a moment and relaxing and releasing and thinking quietly and openly and, in a way, reestablish itself. that place can really help with its location our next students native languages ​​Mandarin Chinese and its location is nothing like Mandarin Chinese. You've obviously worked hard to find something new, but it's still not quite right, but let's listen to it and talk about it.

I don't know, I wanted to watch television. I don't know, I wanted to watch television. I don't know, I wanted to watch television. I feel like I wanted to look. Okay, so I think his tone is lower. would have been and she is breathing in an effort to change the quality of her voice and brava of her, she has done it. You don't really sound like a typical Mandarin

speaker

speaking American English, however, it seems to me like it's gone a bit. a hoarse address and that's also not entirely natural for speaking American English, so let me hear it again.

I don't know, I wanted to watch television. I don't know, I don't know. uh uh, so for me to try. Get that sound, uh, uh, I'm pressing forward here in a way that's trying to cause more opening at the top of the throat, I don't know, but really what we want is to think down and open, not up and open, no. . I know that instead of thinking that you're finding something here, what if in your mind you let that go and you put it down and you like to imagine some well or some lake here in your chest?

I don't know and then you think, oh. my voice is attached to that and that's what's coming out that could help release and find that low and open location, but what I love about what this student has done is that they found something completely different, she really played with that and he tried different qualities of the voice and that's very important as you work play with it find new things find new sounds because often students will try to change something and they need to change it so much and they feel comfortable changing it so much or so much and I try to get them, no, you have to do it more, so playing with a wide range can help you find the right place where you want the right place for your voice to be.

Here's a tip if you can find a video from an American. Speaking your native language and hopefully with a very thick American

accent

, look at that person and think about why they sound so strange or look so strange and then think, whatever the quality of the sound is, this is what I should do when I speak American English, right? So maybe hearing an American speak Chinese, for example, and with a thick American accent, you might be able to identify the sound by hearing it in your own native language. You should try to find um in American English, so it might be interesting if you can find it. a native American English speaker speaking your native language to mimic the way you speak your language, which might help you find a new location and you know, if you find a good video, a good example of someone American speaking your language native with a strong American accent, please put it in the comments below with the timecode of the

best

part of that video so other students can watch it, imitate it, and find another way to use your voice.

Let's look at some more examples. Next we have Brazilian. Portuguese Hey, what do you want to do tonight? Hey, what do you want to do tonight? Hey, what do you want to do tonight? Hey, what do you want to do tonight? Hey, what do you want to do tonight? Well, so for me this is a bit. less tight than some of the others, but it still feels like the voice lives and vibrates maybe here hey hey hey what do you want what do you want boom and we want to turn it down hey hey what do you want to do tonight hey we want to open it up and turn it down okay let's listen Another student's native language is Korean.

Hey, what do I want to do tonight? Hey, what do I want to do tonight? Hey, what do I want to do tonight? I want to do tonight Hey, what do you want to do tonight? Well, first a couple of things. I would say try to tone it down. Hey, hey, hey, hey, what do you want to do tonight? See what you can find by downloading it. Hey, what do you want? what to do tonight, but again it feels like the resonance is very high in my cheekbones hey, hey, hey, it's almost like I've drawn things with this tension here on my neck, hey, and then I have the opposite shape, It's like in my mind.

The shape when I'm imitating you is like a triangle with the wide part on top, but then when I want my own American location, the triangle is flipped so that the narrow part is on top and the wider part is on the bottom. Hey, hey, and just imagining that helps me find a lower location. Another thing I wanted to say is that sometimes when I imitate students with a higher placement, I feel like something in my neck that I'm holding here opens and folds and relaxes like this. You know, it's like we have to use images here to try to guide you as you play with things, but also use images to play with sounds, but also use images to try to find different sounds, so maybe you can feel like there's something up here in your throat and just Imagine it opening and relaxing out and down and see if that helps open your throat in a way that changes the vocal tract in a way that gives it a more American location.

Now we are going to listen to another student whose native language is Spanish. I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know oh oh oh again it feels like I'm not using any of this space for the vibration, no, no, and it's just caused by a little tension here. I think it has to do with the base of the tongue, where it joins the throat, and just letting it go, another thing you might imagine is. You know, we talked about thinking about freeing up the back of your neck by imagining something very heavy on it, like your skin has this very thick, heavy paste.

You might also think about that happening with the front of your throat, oh, like the outside. You just get this, the outside of your neck gets this kind of heavy feeling, not a strangled one, but like a nice downward pull, they can help you find that kind of quality in your voice. Now we're going to look at a couple of examples of students who I think did a good job of finding low placement and we're going to talk about something called vocal fry, so this is something that actually just happened in my voice when I said the vocal fry.

I fried that quality. of the voice at the end of a phrase as the energy of the voice starts to slow down the breathing starts to slow down and as the pitch goes down it will happen that at the end you may find one or two words that end up having that kind of quality quality quality quality you would never want to talk like that all the time that really hurts to do that so you would never want to do it all the time but American men and women do it all the time towards the end of a sentence without thinking about it um and I think it's a side effect The placement may be solo and the initial pitch may be lower than you're used to, so if you notice that happening to your voice at the end of sentences, that may be a good sign that you're lowering your voice. things are okay let's listen to a student his native language is Brazilian Portuguese I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know, no, no, there was a bit of popcorn in his voice and I felt that It was echoing down here.

Well, we have another person to listen to. This guy speaks Dutch. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Again, do you notice a little bit of that popcorn quality the pitch is low, that's the fundamental frequency the resonance feels low and warm which means the formants are not higher or thinner I like it, okay so you have a lot of different ways to play, play with different placements and play. With imitating as many of these students as you can, try to find what they're doing, try to place the voice where they're placing it and then try to find something else, see how how wide you can go with your range of what you do. you could do, you could take any vowel, so I changed the way it sounded, not by changing my articulators, they stayedin exactly the same place, not changing the pitch, the fundamental frequency that was the same in all of them, but they were three dramatically different sounds. because of what I was doing with my vocal tract, try to take a vowel, try to get as many different sounds as you can without changing the pitch, these are the things that you can do in the ways that you can play to find out what's in your neck makes what sound and keep in mind that the American sound is low, very open, vibrating in the chest, it's not really up here, it's not narrow but it's deep, what did you think of this video?

It was super confusing. I hope there is at least one. which helped them think about placement in a new way. Many thanks to all the students who submitted a video for me to use again. If you haven't already, check out last week's video that shows all the student videos in full Now, the next thing I think you should watch is learning English with a movie playlist that you really need to consider. the location and this idea of ​​low and open while listening to the American speaker and then try to do it yourself, imitate them pause the video, imitate them, focus on the location, see what happens guys we make new videos here every Tuesday, subscribe to receive notifications yes I haven't done it yet and I'll be back.

I would love to see you here and also share this video. This is a different type of video for me. We got a little more technical, but I hope it helped you. I hope it meant something. for you and if so please share it, well guys, that's all and thank you very much for using Rachel's English.