Hello?
The word you’re looking for is losing. Only one ‘o’. ‘Lose’ rhymes with ‘booze’, and is the opposite of ‘win’. ‘Loose’ rhymes with ‘noose’, and is the opposite of ‘tight’. So now that I’ve relieved myself of my grammar Nazi urges:
Are you asking people think losing an accent is an improvement? Or are you asking how to lose an accent in order to “improve” yourself? Or somethimg esle entirely?
Her OP must have been eaten.
.:Nichol:. please repost.
If the accent is bad enough to interfere with communication, then I think losing it is an improvement.
I don’t agree that it does. If you have a British accent, for example, and try to “Americanize” it (or vice versa), first of all, you are not being true to yourself, and secondly, you are decieving others. You tend to look foolish, and that is certainly not an improvement.
But having a British accent as opposed to an American one would not necessarily interfere with communication. At least not most of the time; the occasional differences in word choice are easily explained. Lots of Americans find British accents charming.
On what we’re guessing the OP was, I agree with Revtim. I’ve had teachers with strong accents, to the point where the lectures and classes were close to useless. Ditto with anyone in medicine, where miscommunication could have serious consequences.
I worded my post poorly. I was referring to the cases where people (I’ve seen it happen) have adopted European accents (usually British, sometimes French, sometimes Irish) in an attempt to sound more intellectual, witty, cultured, etc. It was often pegged as fake right off the bat, and the person lost any credibility they may have had going into the situation.
I lost an accent very quickly to avoid being beaten up all the time, if that counts as improving myself. I moved from Tennessee to Los Angeles when I was 10, and the mockery was unceasing and unbearable. Took maybe two years to shake the accent completely.
On the plus side, the experience sparked an interest in language and linguistics. I remember the exact moment when I noticed there’s no particular reason the word “can’t” should be pronounced “caint”.
On the minus side, I think regional accents are charming, and I lament the fact that they’re gradually disappearing (due to television, I think, as well as mobility). Perhaps I’ll start saying “caint” again.
I’m from the San Fernando Valley and have a Val accent that you can hear a mile off–I go places (even inside the Valley, which is just ridiculous) with my friends and everyone around us starts saying, “like, omigod, totally!” Which is, you know, embarrassing. So once I’m out of Southern CA I intend to lose this accent right quick. Unfortunately I’m only travelling as far as San Diego for college, so I guess it’ll have to wait.
My accent’s all screwy because I grew up in the South, spent some time in Minneapolis and New York, and then Canadia, and I use lots of (obviously fake) accents trying to be funny, like British, Indian, and lately trying to get down the Eastern European girl’s accent at my job.
People here ask me where I’m from, people up North ask me where I’m from – it’s mostly generic television American, but I tend to pronounce things oddly at random from time to time.
I confess at one point, I did actively try to minimize my Southern accent. Which is now a little sad, because I kind of want it back, but it sounds very odd to me when I try. 
Hmm. I try to maintain my California accent to improve myself. I much prefer it to the Michigan accent I am surrounded by. I have a natural tendency to mimick accents, so this is something of a struggle.
P.S. Michiganders? I don’t care what you say, you do NOT sound like TV newscasters.
I didn’t try to lose my accent as a way of raising my social status, but rather to make myself understood. A lot of my friends in college didn’t speak English as their first language and had a hard time understanding Bostonians (hell, most native speakers have a tough time with that). When I started teaching ESL and later moved overseas, I kept working on making my speech as easy to understand as possible until now I don’t have the accent even when speaking casually.
Southerner transplanted to Cali checking in here…
I find that the “California” accent sounds, well, a bit whiney and overdone. It’s like listening to a Richard Pryor or Chris Rock do imitations of generic “white people.” Certain elements, particularly the long “I” sound seems over the top. It can sound presumtuous, almost ‘preacher-like’ at times, as if the subject matter is so important that every consonant must be prounounced to dictionary perfection, even in day-to-day “blabbering.”
I have to pay attention not to write someone off just due to their accent, especially when I must sound like Luke Duke to these folks out here.
When a speech teacher played back a tape I was horrified to hear a deep South Texas accent.
Worked for 2 years to try to develop what was then called “Broadcast English.”
I lost most of my accent, I think. If I spend a few weeks at home, in the deep South, I pick it up again pretty quickly. I love to hear someone speak with a sophisticated southern accent.
I also have a tendency to mimick what I hear around me, unconsciously. I was raised in the Midwest, bot my family is from NJ, and if I’m around them for a day or two I start to talk like them. Oddly enough, even though my parents grew up less than 100 miles from each other in NJ, they sound totally different from each other. Mom, who has lived in the Chicago area for the past 30+ years, still has the NJ accent in a big way - south Jersey, near Philly, not north Jersey, which is the one everyone imitates. Dad speaks neutral English, even though he moved back to the East Coast 17 years ago and is in NJ to see family at least a couple times a month, has retained his linguistic neutrality, and believe me, he’s no linguist.
When I worked mostly with Russians, I started to speak English with a Russian accent at work. It was really bad. I’m sure they all thought I was making fun of them, but really, I wasn’t.
I have no identifiable accent when speaking Spanish. Really… people place me coming from every other country except where I’m from, Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans ask me if I was born or raised in another country (answer: no). My accent sounds different to any other major group.
That said, there is one thing I share with the rest of the people from my country. I pick up the accent (in Spanish) of someone from another place. I spent a week in Peru, and by the end of it I had a mix of Peruvian with my weird accent. It didn’t wear off until a week after I returned home.
In English, though, I have a very thick Spanish accent. I hate it. I know I shouldn’t think that way, but in my mind, people think less of me when they hear me talk with my accent. Specially when I struggle with some words.
I’d love to lose my accent. Europeans make all sorts of assumptions about you when they hear you speak with an American accent. At a time like this when America is not the most popular country with Europeans, it gets to be a bit of a drag.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t do a Dublin accent to soiv me loif, so I’m kind of stuck with it.
In my business (TV News) there seem to be two trends nowadays - the one that says everyone has to speak with no accent, a.k.a. “announcer-speak” and the one where regional accents are beginning to make a comeback for some on-air positions.
For instance, we recently had an opening for a meterologist. Among the finalists was a very smart and talented yound lady from Alabama. Oh BOY, was she from Alabama. The ‘Bama was spoutin’ outa her on about ever sentence, y’all. Her on-air presentation was toned down a bit, however, and she came across as charming, not hard to understand.
There was considerable debate among the newsies about whether the person to be hired would be her or a gal form southern California with no discernable accent. The SoCal lady got the job mostly because her agent was willing to be more flexible on contract terms, but the 'Bama lady was right down to the wire and would probably have been our new meteorologist had the money situation been worked out.
Contrast that to a recent reporter position we had open - pretty much all of the candidates for that position that had any kind of accent at all were rejected. I guess the consultants tell us that regionalism in weather, sports and feature reporters is OK, but they don’t like it for hard news.
Me? I’m a mutt of Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts and New Hampshire dialects - and now I live in Oregon where, to me anyway, people don’t seem to have any kind of accent. I have to work to get into the “annoucer-speak” mode, but I can and do for work sometimes. Otherwise, whatever comes out of my mouth is what you get.
As for “improving yourself” by changing or getting rid of an accent? Since we never got to see the OP, I’m not sure what the real issue is, but it seems to me that “to thine own self be true” - if people don’t like your accent, screw 'em. If you have to suppress it to be Tom Brokaw, then you have to, but otherwise, who cares?
I intentionally canned my accent a loooooong time ago. I was born and raised in NW Ohio (which, except for a few mild regionalisms, really is the closest accent I’ve heard to “news speak”). My mom was from SW Tenn and my dad from NE Indiana.
Mom’s accent was pronounced but not strong enough that anyone ever had to ask, “What?” Dad’s accent is slightly more rural than the standard NW Ohio, but very subtle.
With these two as my primary benchmarks, I ended up with an amalgamated accent that very closely resembles NW Texas. When I was in elementary school I got put into speech therapy by my school (an embarrassing experience for an already fat and self-conscious kid) because I “couldn’t” pronounce the “r” sound in the middle and ends of words. Turned out that I damn well could pronounce them, I’D JUST NEVER HEARD THEM.
Anyway, I shed my accent unconsciously to blend in with the NW Ohio pattern, and it wasn’t until my late teens that I’d even realized I’d done it. When I’m very relaxed, drunk or tired, the Texas-sounding accent still comes out, and I don’t mind anymore when it does.
I keep the adopted accent for professional situations, since any southern accent tends to drop your estimated IQ by at least 20 points in the minds of anyone who doesn’t have one already, but I’ve grown to really like my “natural” accent and let it come out around family and friends.
I’m also a natural mimic and pick up the accents of whomever I’m around. One set of accents I’ve never been able to pick up, though, are the New England accents. When I’m around a New Englander, my speech tends to vapor lock a little bit, because my inner parrot just can’t make those sounds but tries to.
I even worked with a dialogue coach for a play I was in once where the character was a New Englander and we couldn’t pull it off. We ended up going with an accent that blended a couple of British accents with some American Georgia, and it approximated close enough for the role.