How Far Can a Good Accent Take You?

Story 1

I'm in a friend group with people from all over the world. One of us is Thai, she's learning Chinese, and she loves practicing on our Hong Kong friends. The other day I heard her speaking Chinese and she was totally fluent. Smooth, fast, and she sounded exactly like the Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong movies I grew up watching. I couldn't help it.

“Wait, how long have you been studying Chinese? How did you learn it? You sound like a native speaker.”

Our Hong Kong friends spun around instantly.

“That’s because it’s not your language.”

Ouch. But they had a point. It works the same way with English. Whether someone's accent, pronunciation, or intonation sounds right depends on who's listening, and native and non-native speakers hear it very differently.

Story 2

A while back, my team worked with a group of developers from one of the big tech companies here. One of them was Vietnamese, and his accent was heavy. I was the only person on our team who could understand him, and everyone else on the team was a U.S. citizen. It made sense to me. His English was the English I learned in Vietnam, the same English every Vietnamese person learns there.

To everyone else, about 95% of what he said was noise. So his ideas, and they were really good ideas, kept getting brushed past. My boss literally asked me to translate what the guy was saying, because he couldn't follow.

So if you're a foreigner in the U.S., you can be really good at your job and still find that your accent is one of the things holding your career back.

Story 3

Actually, that’s not quite right.

I've also worked with plenty of people of Indian descent whose accents were so thick I couldn't understand a word. But they were senior managers, directors, that tier. Nobody cut them off, and nobody tuned them out.

So let me correct myself: your accent doesn’t matter. Your title does.

Story 4

Live in the U.S. long enough and you notice that whether an accent is "good" depends on who's listening.

I've watched people from Europe show up with thick European accents, and some of them could barely get through a full sentence in English. Wrong pronunciation, wrong grammar, the works. The Americans around them didn't care. They kept chatting and hanging out with them anyway. Sometimes the person hardly said anything at all, and they'd still hear “You have a sexy accent” or “Haha you’re so funny.”

Now compare that to how Americans react to South Park, the famous animated sitcom. There's an episode with a Chinese restaurant owner who speaks English, and people lose it laughing. The setup is a white guy with Dissociative Identity Disorder, and one of his personalities is the restaurant owner. The voice actor is a white American doing a Chinese accent for the character. That's what makes it funny to them. Hmmm.

So how do I say this: whether an accent sounds good also comes down to your face, your skin color, and where you are from.

Story 5

I've been emceeing for years, so I know how this works back home. To MC in Vietnam, you need an accent everybody can understand, basically the accent of a VTV news anchor (VTV is Vietnam's mainstream TV network for breaking news). That standard is real because we're taught from the time we're little how every Vietnamese word is supposed to sound. Standard Vietnamese exists, and the whole country knows what it sounds like.

Then I moved to the U.S. and started noticing that people say the same English word differently. Not wildly different, but enough that I couldn't tell if I was saying it right. When English is your second language, you don't have an answer key. Back home, you do. Think of “L” and “N” in Vietnamese, or the ngã and hỏi tone marks. You can say those wrong, but everybody knows the correct version, and has since elementary school.

So I started asking my American friends. Turns out nobody here teaches you how a word is supposed to be pronounced, and there’s no such thing as “standard” English like we have back in Vietnam. People just talk a lot, so they say words however comes naturally.

Story 6

Quick detour back to Vietnam. We have accents too: Northern, Central, Mekong Delta, Southern, and so on. You can tell where someone is from the second they open their mouth, and we all still understand each other.

The people I'm most impressed by are my friends from Central Vietnam. They move south for school, pick up the Southern accent, and do the impression so well you'd think they grew up there. Then one day a friend of mine was talking to his dad back in his hometown, and I was shook. I couldn't understand a single word he said to his family.

So yeah, accents can be trained.

Story 7

British accents are hard for me to follow, and I always assumed that meant my English wasn't good enough. When I took the IELTS, I had to listen to British, Australian, Irish, and other accents back to back, and my brain was cooked.

Then one day I was watching a British movie with a friend (born and raised in America), no subtitles. A character said something I totally missed, so I turned to my friend and asked what the guy just said. My friend looked at me and said, “I have no clue.” I was floored. Turns out even Americans don’t understand 100% of British accents.

Story 8

The first movie I ever watched in a U.S. theater without subtitles was Dune 2. And I swear, my English isn't even that good. No subtitles, the sound was low, and because it's fantasy, there was a whole bunch of vocabulary from that world that I'd never seen spelled out. I walked out and spent a while wondering why my English was so bad.

Later I was talking about it with my white roommate. I told him I only caught about 30% of what they said and filled in the rest from the characters' actions and emotions. He hit me with this:

“My family’s been here for generations, I was born and raised here, English is my first language, and I still don’t understand what they’re saying in that movie, let alone you.”

And just like that, I was spared one round of imposter syndrome.

Story 9

Americans have a whole range of accents too. New York, West Coast, Midwest, Southern, plus African American, Latino, Indian, and Asian American accents. I noticed that people tend to understand their own community's accent the easiest, and anyone who grew up around lots of different accents finds those accents easy to follow.

Which brings me to my theory. I don't think people fail to understand you because of your accent. I think it's because your sentence structure and word choice feel unfamiliar. You can pronounce things differently, but if you phrase things the way people are used to, African American and white listeners alike will get you right away. And plenty of people from other countries might mispronounce words, yet if they put the stress in the right places and build sentences the usual way, native speakers have an easier time with them. Vietnamese works the same way.

So accent isn’t that important either. Sentence structure and word choice matter more.

Story 10

That said, there are still people who score an 8 on the IELTS and speak fluently in Vietnam, then go abroad and can't get a word out. They get timid, and it really deflates them.

But then again, nobody picks their first language. Nobody knows exactly where they'll end up living or which language they'll need there. So how your accent lands depends on who's listening, your title, your skin color, your ethnicity, where you live, the words you use, and plenty of other things.

Either way, if English isn't your first language and you live in an English-speaking country, native speakers are going to hear your accent. That's just the deal.

So, guys, I don’t give a f* about accents anymore.

Story 11

I left this one blank for you. If you’ve got stories like these too, tell me yours.