Here’s Why Conventional English Classes and Courses Can Hurt Your Accent

So you are excited about American English. You want to speak fluently so you can socialize, connect, and enjoy talking to everybody. You want to enjoy all the benefits and opportunities that come with your better fluency and accent.

To do that, then you think you should take courses and classes…

Wrong!

Yes, English courses and classes are great for teaching the rules of the English language. So they help you make correct sentences. More than anything else, they help your writing.

But do they help you with your accent and fluency?

Absolutely, not!

In fact, they can hurt your fluency…

As you know, the native speakers of the English language never took classes to speak English. Then why do you have to take classes to do that?

All you have to do is to follow the same path as the native speakers. You’ll see how, as you go through these articles and programs.

You may ask: How could classes hurt my English?

What they do in English classes is that they teach you the words in English and their meanings. They then teach you how to put these words together to make sentences the right way.

If you are a good student, what you achieve at most is creating great sentences.

Does that make you fluent?

No way! In fact, it makes your English choppy and broken.

It does that because your mind is constantly building sentences from words. Others can hear how words in your speech sound separate and choppy.

Imagine you were supposed to walk following the rules of walking, say, put the right foot forward, then transfer your weight over it, now move your left foot, etc. That’s ridiculous. How would your walking look like? Natural?

That’s the bottom-up or reductionist approach.

Native speakers never talk like that. Native speakers say sentences and phrases as one whole, so they sound fluent and unbroken.

So, even though the conventional classes can help you with your grammar and writing, they can actually hurt your accent.

To have a better accent and be fluent, you must take a top-down or a more holistic approach to English.