Customer Reviews

American Accent Training (Book and Audio CD, 2nd Edition)

5 star:		(72)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I do agree with the other reviewers that it is an excellent book written by a professional with extensive experience. It comes with 6 CD and almost 200-page book with detailed explanations of intonation patterns and sounds. Additionally, in the appendix Ann Cook discusses in detail what are the typical accents of native speakers of common languages, and what specifically the native speakers of these languages should work on.

The chief difficulty with working with a course like this is that the learner should not only repeat after the speaker, but should also be able to hear his/her own words to make the necessary corrections. If you keep on repeating the same mistake, but do not hear it and cannot correct yourself - what's the point of practicing? My solution is to practice with a computer. I tried a simple sound recorder on a computer as well as a tape recorder, and it did not work - too complicated, invoves too much button pressing. You need a program which plays a phrase, then records you repeating it, then repeats the native speaker, then plays your recording, and does it all over again in a loop until you are satisfied. It turned out that it is not easy to find a program like this; after a long search, I found a shareware program called FollowMe, its trial version can be downloaded from tarsoft's site or shareware servers (perhaps there are other programs like this which I did not come across, I am talking about the learning concept here). For me personally working with a computer and using a program like described above made a tremendous difference, I really feel that I am getting the most from this book. I can hear my mistakes and I feel that I am correcting them.

While with a course like this the price is much less important than the result and productivity of learning, this book (in my opinion) satisfies both, good quality and reasonable price. Recommended.

This is a fantastic book. HIGHLY recommended. It even moved me to write my first review on Amazon. I had no idea that improving my accent would be so much fun and so interesting. The main strengh of the book is in the system. The first one third of the course is devoted to the intonation training, which builds a good foundation for the individual sound training that is to come later. Instead of focusing on particular sounds from the beginning, you learn to think large and change your actual speech flow.

There are a couple of books on the market with a price tag of $100+ that get good reviews - I am not familiar with them, they might be good too - but in the price leage of this book ($30+) you can't get anything better for the money.

Of course, what matters the most is how committed you are and how much actual time you spend practicing. I think this book provides a good foundation for my work on my accent reduction. If I need more excersises on particular sounds in the future, I might think about getting some other books as additional study aids, but to pick just one book for $40, nothing can beat Ann Cook's book.

Plus, the course includes CDs, not tapes, which is of tremendous convenience. I tend to repeat each exercise lots of times until I feel I am ready to move on to the next one. You can't do it so easily with the tapes.

The only drawback is the packaging. When I got the book, some of the CDs where scratched and not playable. I had to exchande them not even once, but twice. So, maybe buying it online isn't such a good idea - be warned! At least, my local book store could order 3 new sets for me and let me open them and pick the good CDs. If you buy online, the last think you want to do is to deal with returns and exchanges.

Overall, great book! I am recommending it to all my friends and family members.

If you are like me and sick of being asked all the time where you are from as soon as you open your mouth, this book is for you. Hope you'll benefit from it too. Good luck to you all!

Ann Cook has put together the clearest, most insightful program for acquiring an American accent that I have found. You get 5 very useful CD's all cued to the manual, a small mirror, markers, and an excellent manual. Quite a value! She understands the American accent perfectly and masterfully explains the ingredients that make up that accent. I am a native speaker/speech therapist and I learned a good deal from this package. I do have one small reservation: a few of her examples of American speech which she considers standard (spoken by educated speakers) sound, to my ears, like mumbling and non-standard speech (ex: "didee" for "did he", "wooden knee" for "wouldn't he"). I prefer a bit more clarity where consonants are concerned. Dropping consonants has always been a sign of low socio-economic American speech, not standard American speech. This is a minor complaint about an otherwise excellent package.

This book offered me a good insight into how to change my accent to sound more like an American. The book is well written and took me through the steps one-by-one. My success, however, was moderate. First, accent reduction is not for the lazy. You must work very hard. Second, I had no way to know when I was getting an intonation or pronunciation wrong. I found I was spending a lot of time practicing and, at times, I was reinforcing the wrong thing. Although the book was helpful, I found I really had to work with a competent accent reduction teacher to make significant improvement.

I am very glad that I found the first edition of "American Accent Training" book in a library a couple years ago. I looked at three or four similar books at the time and American Accent Training was the most practical and comprehensive book I was able to find. I purchased the book and ended taking lessons via phone with Ann who helped me greatly to improve my American English accent. I found her approach to accent training very practical, easy to apply and practice every day at work or in public. The book and audio CDs are also very helpful for "do it yourself approach". But make no mistake - to purchase the book is the easiest step, the hardest thing is to practice your new skills every day. Regarding myself, everytime I open Ann's book I notice and learn new things about my accent again and again.

Ann Cook managed to put together a clear-cut method which successfully sensitizes non-native speakers of English to the dynamics and peculiarities of spoken English at the discourse level. By means of the staircase or "jump up & step down" intonation pattern, she highlights the importance of PITCH as the main marker of prominence. Moreover, her explanation of the origin and pronunciation of nominal compounds (set phrases), such as "cable car", "blue jeans" and "party animal", on page 25, filled with real-life examples and insightful comments, is certainly one of a kind. However, there are a few shortcomings that are worth mentioning: In her effort to make the book as user-friendly as possible, she equates "putting stress on a word" to " making intonation" which leads students to the mispercetion that adjectives in descriptive phrases, such as "yellow house",and verbs followed by proper nouns as in "John bought the car" should be completely toned down or that a word/syllable that receives sentence stress is ALWAYS the highest in pitch. Besides, there is very little information on phrasing, that is, on how thought groups are usually formed. For this reason, I'd recommend that whoever is interested in using her book, first get acquainted with the distinction between FUNCTION WORDS and CONTENT WORDS and the grammar-based process behind the formation of THOUGHT GROUPS. Although the terms sound difficult, I can assure you the idea is pretty simple and you won't have trouble understanding it. It can certainly be "googled" or found in any good pronunciation book such as Linda Grant's WELL-SAID. A final word of advice: beware of the pronunciation of the diphthong "OU" in words like "mouth", "about", "loud", as read by Ann Cook herself. Run these words by your American friends and see if they really pronounce them with the frontal vowel of "cat" + "oo" ( for lack of phonetic symbols) as "maéuth", "abaéut", "laéud" as heard on the CD's. I suspect many of them do not.

Excellent start for anybody who wants to correct their foreign accent.

If you, already, have a pretty good understanding of english, and want to find a way to correct your accent, this book is a great start. Written in plain english, points out every common mistake you, as a foreign speaker, can make, and explains the cause; makes you go "ah-ha so that's what it was(!)"

Get it. worth the money to say the least.

I am an ESL teacher and have had a great deal of success with this book. I have found that those students who make the techniques taught in this book into habits, and honestly put forth the effort to implement them into their everyday speech, are able to almost completely eliminate their accents over time. The techniques truly work. I had a whole library full of books at my disposal, but this is the one I have stuck with!!! It is not a one-time-read miracle book, but rather a handbook that, if reviewed often, can help a student get rid of their accent.

I had a look an many of the books on accent reduction and American Accent training. Many of the books had exercises similar to American Accent Training (AAT). But what they did not have was that not only were the exercises read aloud by the author but also the passages BETWEEN the exercises are read by her. This helped me greatly because I could repeat the exercises as well and the passages. So, I had twice as much material as any other book!

Ms. Cook is very helpful is giving suggestions and one can actually write/email her. And she is quick in replying back too. I liked this because I could ask more about the book and her suggestions on studying from the book. Its greatly helps to ask the author about his/her book.

She encouraged me to learn through telephone conversations but I thought that to be rather expensive.

The BOOK:

The book starts with basic pronunciations and goes into details like liasons between words. With 5 CDs there is alot to learn. Also, with CDs it is easy to rewind or repeat the tracks as often we wish. The book does a great job in teaching students many of the tricks and pronunciation rules one observes with the Americans.

My best suggestion in using this book would be to read, practice and listen to Americans. I learnt alot by observing how the Americans speak and very often you can relate a certain pronunciation to a rule in the book. And, that is fun!

Before you start this training, you need to record and hear your own voice. Record your voice every week you use the training to see the transformation in your accent. The book told me to call someone but it was expensive.