[LOCUTOR]

Track twenty-two, unit ten, the world is your oyster

[PHILLIPS]

The sound system is really the first things we learn about our languages, right? So the rise and fall and intonation and pitch and those kinds of things, as well as the actual speech sounds of our language - those are literally some of the first things that we learn in our infancy.

[EMILY KWONG]

Which is why adults struggle to produce the speech sounds of another language. But when it comes to pronunciation and accents, Sarah kind of pushed back on my questions, asking me, who do you imagine as a perfectly native speaker anyway? Is it fair to compare yourself to that person?

[PHILLIPS]

I'm willing to bet that your lived experiences are going to be dynamically different from the person who you envision as your native speaker. And so you might not ever actually become native, like, in your pronunciation. But I don't think that that should be something that people stress over. And the reason being is that the way that we use language fits our identity.

[EMILY KWONG]

So I can let go of the idea of sounding just like my grandparents, who grew up in Beijing...

[SOFIA]

Right.

[EMILY KWONG]

...Because it's here in the U.S., among my extended family and other Chinese Americans, that I long to be understood.

[PHILLIPS]

Are you saying it well enough to be understood? That should be, really, the threshold upon which you want to cross.

[SOFIA]

Oh, my gosh. I love that. That's so comforting. Like, this is like language therapy right now - like learning a new language therapy - because everybody worries about that, pronunciation, when they're trying to speak in a different language, right?

[EMILY KWONG]

Yeah, it took the pressure off enormously.

[SOFIA]

Right.