I am not saying you should do this, but if you want to de-accent, then my sample size of about 7 suggests there is one way to do it.
Some correlated traits: * mimicking. A critical skill, which is poorly encouraged as a general skill, and as adults we often have habits or beliefs that interfere with it. * perseverance and repetition * exploring/using different ways of learning and working out what are effective means of learning and ignoring invalid common techniques. * Avoiding book learning and rule based learning.
My belief is: look at how a baby or child manages to do it, try to do what they do, and avoid using any parts of the brain they don't use when learning. Not to say I am fluent in another language, just to say what I see in successful second language speakers, and how I try to begin learning (I mostly lack perseverance and repetition!)
Of course, what is it like to have no accent? All of these people are mentioning Friends, in which they have a "standard" American accent, which says something about American-centric view of the whole debate. I've heard that I don't have an accent (from someone who wasn't American), though I don't know if he meant that I had a vanilla American accent or that I simply didn't have any accent that could be pinpointed.
Perhaps learning how to mimic accents of people from different regions (Irish, Jordie, Scottish, Alabama, BBC etc etc) of your own mother tongue gives you opportunity to learn how to hear and say different vowels and consonants from another language. Or practice the accent off non-native speakers e.g. a French accent for a Parisian speaking English.
You can normally make assumptions about someone's place or class within a few words or phrases in the UK
EG "fillum" for "film" for people from the North East, "supper" instead of "dinner" for middle/upper class people.
This might be better phrased as a "native accent" for the region you're in. It's another way of saying that others can't pick out anything in the way you speak that identifies you as from somewhere else.
It was "Married with Children" with closed captioning on that taught me how to actually speak American English. It took me a while to figure out what a "hooter" is and why Bud Bundy would want to pretend to be a FIDE ranked Grandmaster without earning that title, but it was all very educational.
He’d worked so hard to be perfect—what could he possibly have done wrong? It wasn’t a feeling he was used to.
“Where did you learn English?” the teacher asked.
Max responded: “Watchu talkin’ ‘bout, Mr. Harris?”
Mr. Harris kindly suggested he switch from Different Strokes reruns to the nightly news. Embarrassed but undeterred, Max did, and his near-flawless English steadily improved.
"College. And the Police Academy movies."
I'm starting to feel some sympathy with the Academie Francaise [1]. At least the US English <--> British English traffic in terms of idioms isn't all one way [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise
I would love to see this provide the ability to learn other languages, for which subtitles might be hard to find.
Edit: Oh, and I still watch everything with captions, in case I missed something or there are words I didn't know.
There's an interview with Max Levchin somewhere in which he says that he watched some TV show over and over and repeated everything that was said in order to rebrand himself as a midwesterner after he moved to the US. His English is really good, too.