5 Super Quick Ways To Practice Your American Accent

We all know we need to be practicing our American accent but how often are you actually practicing?

In today’s episode I am sharing 5 easy ways to practice your American accent so you can start getting results. 

By the time you finish listening, you’ll know:
• Five quick and easy ways to practice your American accent
• Why you haven’t been practicing consistently
• How to find time in your day to practice your accent

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Ready to master the American accent?

Join me for my free 5 day American accent challenge starting soon! katherinebeck.com/challenge

If this episode inspires you then I'd love to hear from you! Take a screenshot of you listening on your device, post it to your Instagram stories and tag me @katherine_beck_

Then follow me on Instagram to go 'behind the scenes' with me and my own journey as an American accent coach and Voiceover Actor.

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SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Katherine Beck
You're listening to the All American actors Podcast, episode 69. In today's episode, I'm going to reveal five super quick, easy ways to practice your American accent that's coming up next. Ready to go behind the scenes and learn what it really takes to build a sustainable career as a working actor in the US film and TV industry. Join me Katherine Beck, your all American accent coach, as I give you the insight and inspiration to take action on your career, learn my best tips and tricks to performing with an American accent and hear from working actors and other industry professionals. To give you a comprehensive overview of this biz we call showbiz. This is the All American actors podcast. We will get started with today's episode in just a moment. But first, I want to remind you that the All American accent challenge is back, we are going to jumpstart the challenge on June 20. And in just five days, I am going to show you what it takes to master the American accent in performance. So you can start booking those us roles. And so you can start building that sustainable career for yourself as a working actor. Now, how good does that sound? Head over to Katherine beck.com forward slash challenge to register get all the details and I will see you there for day one, we have a fantastic monologue that we're going to be using for this round of the challenge. And if you've done the challenge before you can do it again. That's the really cool thing about the challenge is every single time I do it, it's a new monologue, which means it's a new challenge within the accent. So go ahead, register, grab your monologue, and I will see you there. All right, let us dive into today's podcast episode. This one is a good one. Because listen, we all know that we need to practice our American accent, right? But how often? Are you really practicing your American accent? Now be honest, are you practicing every day? Or are you practicing once a week, or whenever you have a spare moment, or only when that US audition pops up? You see the harsh reality is is that we don't practice nearly as often as we should. And often it comes down to this one very simple reason. We think we need to practice for an extensive amount of time to get a really good practice in Am I right? And I will agree, let's say an hour a day would be amazing to practice every day to keep your skills sharp and ready to go. But I am a realist. And I know that these days, we are very busy. We've got a lot of things to pile into our day. And a lot of my students, they say they're too busy to practice. They know they need to practice but it's just about finding that time or even just remembering to practice. So for me, as a coach, I decided that I needed to come up with creative ways and quick ways to practice the American accent to keep it interesting and easy to do easy to implement into your day to day schedule. So I'm going to break those down with you here. Now, it does not matter how long you practice. You see the key really is consistency. It's that daily practice and to get into the habit of practicing building a new habit, which is practice. So how can we do this? How can you find time in your day where you can find look, all you really need is five to 10 minutes a day to practice and I guarantee you've got that time it's about putting that time into your calendar. So first things first, what I want you to do is I want you to write down block out find a time within your calendar, block it out where you've got at least five to 10 minutes and nothing is going to get in the way of that five to 10 minutes of daily practice. Next, let's break down some quick ways to practice and you're going to notice that with my suggestions that these are things you can easily do on the go or even multitasking meaning you can practice your accent while you're doing something else. So let's go through them. The first one is five minutes of warm up exercises. warm up exercises is like my bare minimum for my students because what we really need to accomplish the goal of warm up exercises is to increase space within the mouth and release tension in your articulators, your articulators we're talking about the movable ones, that's your lips, your tongue, your lower jaw, your soft palate, we want to release any sort of tension that might get in the way of creating that nice open, relaxed space for the American accent. So any of your favorite exercises will do as long as you're doing something to warm up the lips. Something to warm up the tongue, something to release tension in the jaw in something to To stretch that soft palate muscle that's like the bare minimum for me. And then obviously, if you've got more time, do some other vocal warmup exercises to warm up the voice as well. Alright, number two is cold reading. And my favorite things to read are scripts. So you want it to be fresh, something you haven't looked at before, and five to 10 minutes is really all you need to get in that practice challenging yourself with new information words put together in a different way different sentences. And that's really all you need. So that five to 10 minutes reading scripts, scripts is my favorite thing to read. And if you don't have a script, a magazine is excellent, or even when you're out and about reading the street signs is a great way to also get in that cold reading practice. Number three is having a conversation improving in the American accent. Again, this is one of the best things you can do and can do really super fast. Within the day, again, just five to 10 minutes of improvising in the accent having a conversation with someone or even just having a conversation with yourself and the American accent. But without a script. Because what this is going to do, it's going to help you get that flow in the accent feel confident speaking in the accent and performing in the accent. And especially in those moments where perhaps you might be speaking to let's say a casting director or somebody before an audition, whether it's in person or on Zoom, or what have you is that conversation that you want to have in the American accent. Before you start, you want to feel really confident in that when you don't have a script. So I highly recommend implementing this as part of your practice. Number four is changing your placement to speaking in the American placement when you're talking in your natural accent. Okay, so imagine that you're just going about your business in your day to day you're speaking in your natural accent, but you start placing the sounds differently that of the American accent, meaning you're using your tongue and your lips and your lower jaw and your soft palate more in the way of the American accent so that it basically gets your body used to forming sounds in a different way. So it's sort of this kind of like weird hybrid accent that may seep in. But what's happening is you're allowing yourself to physically work on the accent without maybe other people not noticing or knowing that you're practicing it, this is one of my favorite things to do. And if you can start implementing this, I guarantee you're gonna start to notice changes in your accent a whole lot faster. And then number five is your accent break down in scripts, take one sentence a day. And this could be anything like just anything you read or might have in front of you in the day. And I want you to break down the accent into that sentence. So phonetically, if you know phonetics, marking the sounds phonetically or even just how it sounds, identifying the R's in there, especially for the American accent looking at the stress pattern. So how you stress the syllables what key words you want to emphasize in the American accent looking at what are the connecting words, maybe words that we want to de stress within the sentence looking at the rhythm or the pace that you would speak this in the American accent and the intonation patterns, the melody so all of this, if you can break it down just in one sentence each day, you're gonna find it's gonna be so much easier when you get those auditions because you've been doing a little bit of this accent breakdown practice every day. So that is it. Those are my five super quick ways to practice the American accent. Do one a day do all five a day, it doesn't matter. But as long as you're doing at least five minutes, five to 10 minutes of practice each day. I've given you some really great examples and ways that you can practice so make sure you implement it. Find time in your calendar block that time out so you get in your practice each and every day. All right, that is it from me. Now remember to sign up for the challenge by heading over to Katherine beck.com forward slash challenge to learn more about how to master the American accent in performance. We're gonna have so much fun and I look forward to seeing you there. And hey, if you enjoyed this episode, go ahead send me a DM on Instagram at Catherine underscore Beck underscore I'd love to hear what you thought about this episode. Take a screenshot of the show and share it with me on your Instagram story and tag me in it. Now make sure to share the show with all your actor friends. Let them know what's coming up next week and invite them to tune in with you and learn how to become an All American actor so you can be the Working Actor you dream to be until then go practice your American accent and I'll see you back here next time.