American Pronunciation Coach
Specializing in American English pronunciation and accent reduction
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All languages have sound systems, pitch ranges, and rhythm and intonation patterns.  We just don’t all have the same one!  There’s a lot to learn in another language, but the last learning curve for adults is often the “sound” of the other language—the “song” of the language, the pronunciation of the language.  







Japanese Accents
If Japanese is your native language, you may be using Japanese “sound” system when you speak English.  You may not have learned much about this if you studied English as a foreign language.  Or, like many other Japanese adults, you may have worked on your accent forever with little progress.


You may get feedback that listeners find you difficult to understand or that you speak too softly or too staccato. This, and other problems, result from applying what you know and use successfully in Japanese, to English.  You are applying a set of Japanese “sound rules” to English, which has its own sound rules you should be following. 


Some common interference points between Japanese and English:

  • Vowel system differences (English has many more vowels)
  • Consonant system differences (e.g. r and l, h and f, v and b, voicing, clusters)
  • Liaisons between words and vowel reduction in English
  • Word endings (vowel endings in Japanese vs. consonant endings in English)
  • Pitch range and volume are different
  • Stress-timed English vs. syllable-timed Japanese


The above points are specific to sound production inside the mouth, however an inability to produce these probably means an inability to hear, and therefore understand, their use by native speakers.   Furthermore, intonation and sentence stress carry layers of meaning and speaker attitudes that are not conveyed in the actual words.


Perhaps you may want to improve your public presentation skills.  We can create a toolkit you can use in the future to prepare for speaking engagements. 


In our work together, we will diagnose your current pronunciation habits, define our goals, determine your skills and needs in targeted areas, and create a curriculum that guides your accent reduction coursework and leads you to a better sound in English. You will leave with a "toolkit" full of strategies.