(Please don't buy Yes on this market, as it is supposed to incentivise me to work on my pronunciation)
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I spent a couple of hours and realised that I don't hear the difference between some English vowels; I think I can occasionally pronounce things correctly (mostly by trying to imitate the voices of native speakers), but it's not something I can do consistently while paying attention to the conversation, so I'm resolving this to No. Will create another market for 2024
This is something where I would honestly encourage you to spend <$200 on a few lessons on elocution from a drama grad student in your area; your pronunciation challenges seem less like "accented English" and more like "speaking from the front of your mouth rather than your diaphragm" from the video you posted below. This problem also means that you get tired when speaking more rapidly than you should.
(This is an extremely common problem for folks who haven't been trained in public speaking, and our society knows many exercises that address this well.)
@ms I can confirm that at EAG it was very difficult to understand you. I think I understood half your words on average, which made it hard to follow what you were saying, which was a shame as you had interesting positions. I definitely recommend you start working on this !
@Aelerinya Wow, that sounds worse than I expected!
Did I talk fast? Where are you from?
@ms I'm from France. As context I'm Lucie, you might remember me from the monday event. Of course there might be a lot of people understanding you better than me, but I remember you were one of the few people I had a hard time understanding at EAG.
You talked a bit fast, but pronunciation was the problem for me. It was hard to distinguish the syllables. I would describe it as the words being "mushed up". Don't know if that conveys what I experienced
@Aelerinya I think talking to non native speakers makes my brain overcompensate the accent in weird directions somehow. Usually talking slower and paying attention helps. But yeah, sorry about the experience you’ve had!
I’m hopeful this can be improved
I (native English speaker) understood around 70% of the individual words in short clips from this interview. I understood around 90% of the content because I could use context. I had to concentrate quite hard throughout, if I wasn't paying close attention or was very tired it might be harder. The hardest bits were when you spoke quickly, but these seemed to be bits where the words were less important (figure of speech, briefly setting the scene, etc). The grammar was near perfect and no issues with understanding due to grammar.
The clarity varied a lot with speed and enunciation.
It was often lack of distinction between individual syllables (combining them quickly into one was a problem), or changes to consonant sounds (unexpected changes), that was noticeable. I found it quite different to typical accent difficulties with other slavic or similar accents - usually I can compensate well for these as I am used to hearing Polish/Russian accents. Somehow your accent sounded less 'strong' than many, but was less understandable to me. This might be because 'strong' can be about vowel sounds (easy to compensate) or predictable strong consonant changes like a hard 'H' being used in place of a soft 'breathy' one by Russians.
If spoken English is important to you it seems like trying to improve this would be very worthwhile!
Hope that was useful, I tried to give info that I would find helpful in a similar situation.
@FlorisvanDoorn I think it’s not representative as I was speaking to another non-native speaker (and I generally dislike this podcast, it exists for a reason not related to getting dignity points, so usually I don’t share the link to it)
@KongoLandwalker idk, people usually understand me, but sometimes they need some time to adjust, and if I talk fast, a lot of people stop understanding me, and there are some weird dynamics of e.g. me overcompensating for the differences in british/american English depending on what the person seems not to understand