Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

y Life
94
English in everyday communication, they use English in 
sort of very specialized areas, science or linguistics, and 
they’re comfortable with that and they’re very profi cient, 
but they still maintain this accent, so I would say that 
sounding like an American on a phonological point, uh, 
level, of having the American accent, I think that’s a lot 
harder than, um, mastering the grammar or even mas-
tering some of the idiomatic phrases that sort of make 
you stand out as a, would normally make you sound like 
a native speaker but, um, the-the accent is sort of, is very 
tenacious.
I think I pay more attention to them, and I think 
it’s because growing up I was very aware of, I wanted 
to sound like an American when I spoke English, but I 
wanted to sound like a Taiwanese when I spoke Taiwan-
ese. And I had a Taiwanese accent speaking English in 
the beginning, and I was very, very, very determined to 
standardize that accent and make it sound like Middle 
America. So I-I-I do remember watching the news with 
my father and foll-following along underneath my voice, 
and on a soft voice, what the news anchor was saying, 
to try to mold my accent closer to his. And that was at a 
very young age, I was doing that, so that by the time I was 
twelve or thirteen, I had pretty much wiped out whatever 
Taiwanese accent I had. And by the time I was fi fteen, I 
no longer had a Maine accent, so I was as standard as I 
could make my accent. On the Taiwanese side, I was, um, 
always upset when we would go to Taiwan and people 
would look at me and after three minutes of talking to 
me, say, “Oh, you must be an American, you-you came 
here from America.” And that really, that really upset 
me, since Taiwanese was my native language, my fi rst 
language—I didn’t speak English until I was old enough 
to play with other children, um—but living in this coun-
try, with the exposure that I had, I-I had some vestigial 
American accent that people could always identify me. 

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