Why your accent should not hold you back when speaking French

During a break in class, a student of mine (not the best at English, but not bad) asked me to talk to him in French. 

As soon as I opened my mouth he grimaced and said: “Ugh! That’s an ugly accent.”

I addressed this issue in an article a while ago, and most of the time I do not think about it.

Read more: What is the difference between being bilingual and fluent?

However, every now and then someone surprises me with the information that I am not speaking as well as I think I am, and I am not making significant improvement.

Let me stress, that this is not a common problem and it must not be used as a reason to clam up. Communication is a risk in which the benefits always outweigh the discomforts, with very few exceptions.

Almost all people I interact with – 99.99% – make no comment at all about my shortcomings in our shared means of communication. They are delighted that I am making the effort to speak their language and many find my English accent charming. It is completely subjective.

This young man, however, thought that I should do better. I was not putting my heart into it, he told me, and pursued his quarry: ”Why don’t you do something to improve your accent?”

It was not so much a question as a piece of rhetorical frustration. 

I did not point out the irony that he was being taught by a man who had spent a day and a half explaining to him that the object of communication is…er…to communicate; not to get every sound to meet an illusory standard of perfection. 

I tell my students an accent is not to be taken too seriously. It must not become the cause of inhibition.

I told him that after seeing hundreds of French students traipse through my classroom, I had come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of foreign-language speakers – leaving aside those who are taught to be bilingual in the cradle and who grow up without accents. 

Less than 0.1% of the population, in my experience, has the linguistic equivalent of perfect pitch: they can hear the precise sounds of an unfamiliar language and repeat them exactly. 

I have worked with two French teachers, and two or three students, who could pass for natives of Croydon or Dublin without question. The rest of us have to make do with what we’ve got. 

If, after my immense amount of hard work at French, someone criticises my achievement, then it is not my problem but the other person’s. 

If there are two kinds of speakers there are also two kinds of listeners: 0.1% are grumpy so-and-sos and elocution teachers who want to hear a word said right or not at all. The other 99.9% could not care less. They are listening to the contents, not the container.

Part of the problem for my student – why my accent mattered so much to him – was that he had been indoctrinated by a French education system that insists there are right and wrong sounds to make with your mouth. 

Read more: Language: Beware ‘false friends’ but take heart - the French struggle with them too

English, in contrast, has no rules of pronunciation and we do not regard accents as handicaps: they are part of our personality.

I would love to speak French “more properly” but I cannot hear myself not doing it. I am convinced I am pronouncing words beautifully, as I hear them delivered by announcers on the radio. 

Yes, if I record myself I can hear a Brit belabouring the language and some words I will freely admit to butchering in the reiteration. 

But in the heat of a daily exchange I cannot hear the difference between how I say “j’ai froid, je vais rentrer” (“I’m cold; I’m going inside”) – which is how I ended the conversation with my student – and how he supposes I should say it. He understood me perfectly as I stood up to go back to the classroom – so what more is there to say?