Articulator Exercises | Accent Training

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Learn articulator exercises that will help you do a foreign accent from voice and speech coach Andrea Caban in this Howcast video.

Here are some articulator exercises. So, first blow through your lips, and you can use your voice there, and you can go un-voiced. Blow through your tongue, and then un-voiced, and then shake out your face. Okay. Then, you want to take your tongue, and you want to touch every single one of your teeth on the front, top, the back top, the front bottom, and the back bottom. Like this. Faster. One more time.

Good, blow through your lips. Blow through your tongue, and shake out your face. Okay. Next, I want you to isolate your lip corners. So, if you isolate your lip corners, you bring them straight back. Kind of this worthless weird grin. And then go into relaxation. Good, now bring them forward. Good, now relax.

Next, I'd like you to channel and bunch your tongue. This is a really challenging one so try to use a mirror, and watch yourself do it, and you'll get the muscles. Next, I'd like you to exercise your soft palette, or your velum. It's the part that moves when you yawn. So, I want you to yawn. Lovely, now yawn on the right side only. It helps to use your right hand, and then yawn on the left side only. Good, now yawn on both sides. Good, now you really feel your soft palette, when it feels raised. So, in our accent trainings, sometimes the soft palette will be raised, sometimes it will be dropped, but you know where your soft palette is now.

Next, I want you to play with some tongue tip action. So, bring you tongue tip to your alveolar ridge. It's that little gum ridge right behind your front teeth, right here. And, I just want you to go la, and bring the tongue tip down. La, la, great. Now, la, le, li, lo, lu, and you rest your tongue behind your bottom teeth each time. Then, you learn if you learn nothing else from me, this is the trick you want to take away.

Okay, so you want to stick your tongue out and articulate a phrase around your tongue. You're overworking the muscles of your tongue. It's like when a baseball player picks up a bat and weight's it before he goes up to the plate, and then when he goes up to the plate, he takes the weight off, and it's easy to swing. This is the same concept. Okay, so your line of text was, "Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue". Hamlet's Advice to the Players.

You want to stick your tongue and say, "Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue". And, then you stick your tongue back in and it's quite easy to say, "Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue". So, practice these articulator exercises every day, five minutes, and then you'll be in great shape for some accent training.