I work in language learning, and I whenever I meet someone that has successfully deaccented, they always tell the same story of how they did it. Listening to the same thing over and over. Watching a bunch of Friends won't work. You have to watch the same episode over and over. Find a piece of content and keep watching it until you have memorized what they say, and only then you will start hearing the sounds rather than the words and meaning.

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.

But if someone copies that behaviour would they get the same benefits?

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!)

I don't know if it's so hard for most people to de-accent, if they want to. All you have to do is to be able to make all the sounds that are in regular English - for me I was missing -th (ð) sound - and make an effort to pronounce everything correctly. I've always had a knack for imitating people, and it's never been hard for me to imitate any accent or dialect (of my own language or English) as long I've had enough exposure to it. So if I want to adapt a new accent, it's more a question of imitating it until I do it organically - faking it till I make it.

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.

Yes, it is so hard. I am learning Hindi and I can't even hear the difference between several of the consonants, making it very difficult to measure how well I'm pronouncing them. My Chicago friends can't hear the difference when I say Kyle and Karl, so can't teach themselves to imitate it. And even if they could, changing pronunciation habits takes a lot of attention to the way you speak, which takes effort, which is basically the definition of hard. Its nice that its easy for you, but you should try thinking of it as a skill you have rather than sound like you think everyone else is just lazy.

Different English accents have a massive variety of vowel and consonant sounds, and usually one can find a "difficult" vowel sound in some English accent. As a counter-example, in my experience Spanish accents have very little vowel sound variation.

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.

I didn't mean to say that everyone else is lazy - I just thought that having a native accent wasn't a priority for most people. People can usually make themselves understood perfectly as long as their accent isn't too deviant, and having an accent has its own charm :)

I had a Danish friend at University and she asked me how good her English was. I told her it was perfect, but she would never be taken for someone British as there was no sense of "place" or "class" with her accent.

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.

> "what is it like to have no accent?"

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.