American Accent Training with Jesse

I'm Jesse, a professional American accent coach with a master's in English and 10 years of experience teaching pronunciation to English speakers around the world. I work one-on-one with fluent professionals who are tired of feeling stuck at "almost native" — people whose English is already strong but who still get asked where they're from.

Every accent is made of a specific set of habits, and my job is to find out exactly which ones are yours. For some students that's final consonant devoicing, where "bag" comes out sounding like "back." For others it's the vowel difference between "leave" and "live," or between "man" and "men." It might be the two TH sounds, the American R, the difference between W and V, or the silent H in "honest" and "hour." It might be larger-scale issues, like stress, rhythm, intonation, and voice quality/resonance. Some of these habits change how clearly you're understood. Others only change how native you sound. They need different treatment, and I'll tell you which is which.

The features that make the biggest difference are usually the ones no one has taught you to hear: which syllable carries the stress in a word, how unstressed vowels reduce, the flap T that turns "water" into "wa-der," and the way Americans link words together so that speech sounds smooth instead of clipped. This is where most of the real progress happens, and it's the part most students have never worked on.

I teach speakers of every first language — including Russian, Ukrainian, French, Persian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and many others — and I tailor each lesson to the specific habits your native language creates. Whether your goal is to be understood more easily at work or to sound as natural as possible, get in touch. I'll assess your accent, tell you the things worth working on first, and start helping get you there.