Speech Training Quotes

I understand English; I read and write English perfectly, but the accent won't go away.

When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting, which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that.

I went to school. I went to Juilliard. You spend 13 hours a day on voice and speech. Now I realize why.

I took speech training. I took a few voice lessons in college.

My father is from North Carolina, and he got rid of his drawl really fast. He's very much about speaking correctly, enunciating in certain ways.

I think drama school really teaches you how to annunciate; you're conscious that people might not understand you if you speak too fast and too Welsh.

Voices are always a challenge. I always have to work at each accent I do.

When I was a freshman in college, I went to a broadcast class by mistake. The first day, the instructor said, "Television anchors sound like they could be from everywhere and nowhere." From that point on, every time I was near an anchor, when no one was around, they would say something and I would say it right after them. It was this effort to get rid of my accent.

Well, politics is much more severe than entertainment. You have to hit those points, in politics, word for word. You have to remember the date. You have to remember the website. You have to rehearse stories that might be asked, have anecdotes ready for questions that might come up.

I'm getting used to the singing part but not the talking part.

It's hard to learn an American accent. Some of the Rs at the ends of words are incredibly hard.

I have a dialogue coach who helps me out with some of the more tricky Chicago vowel sounds.

I had a Southern accent but I had broken it so hard.

'Particularly' is particularly difficult because the 'L' and the 'R' are totally different, like totally different letters. I would spend hours in front of the mirror with my dialect coach to observe my tongue. You don't think, when you speak, about all the things that happen in your jaw and your mouth, how everything reacts, so you have to watch all those things and realise we have a totally different use of our tongue and jaws.

Mr. Greer timed all our speeches with an oven timer. Things were nothing at Tribeca Alternative, considered one of Manhattan's finest prep schools, if not high tech.

I spent three years at Central School of Speech and Drama in London, which I enjoyed very much.

I went to Julliard where they use a lot of voice and speech exercises.

Working on the accent helped, enormously. I will tell you that when I brought Michael a correct 'British' accent, one that my dialect coach was happy with, he hated it.

When we take voice lessons from the Master, we learn to speak with tenderness.

When I first went to acting school, they made me lose my accent, which is very upsetting for me. The first day of Shakespeare class, I remember the professor was like, 'Oh, boy. Oh no, no, no, no. No, no, no,' and sent me to a voice and speech class to get rid of the accent immediately.

You can learn any accent you want. It's a fascinating thing.

People say there's no trace of an accent anymore, and there isn't because I worked very hard to lose it. And the reason I did that is a British accent in America is a real status symbol.

I was too kind of brave and proud to want a dialect coach because I thought that showed weakness in my armor. But then you just learn it's a more efficient way of doing it. A dialect coach is really important because it takes a certain technical responsibility off your shoulders.

I teach voice, and I teach pretty much just, like, whatever people need. So if they want me to work on a monologue with them, or if they want me to do some work with them, I do that. And then I do master classes, like at high schools - which is my most favorite thing to do.

I had a dialect coach to get an American accent, and then another dialect coach to come off it a bit. There is something deep and mysterious in the voice when it isn't too high-pitched American.