First: your accent is not costing you marks
Many Japanese learners believe they have to lose their accent to get a good speaking score. That is not how these tests work, and acting on it wastes a lot of study time.
Speaking tests do not score how native you sound. They score how intelligible you are — whether a listener can understand you easily, without strain. A speaker with a clear Japanese accent can score at the top. A speaker with a very light accent who mumbles, drops word endings, and stops mid-sentence will not.
So the goal is not "sound American." The goal is: no listener has to guess which word you meant. Everything below is chosen on that test alone.
The sounds that actually lose listeners
Japanese has a smaller set of sounds than English, and a few English contrasts simply do not exist in it. These are the ones where a listener can genuinely hear the wrong word — which is when pronunciation starts costing you.
| Sound | Why it's hard | What a listener may hear |
|---|---|---|
| /r/ vs /l/ | Japanese has one liquid sound, between the two. | rice / lice, play / pray, collect / correct |
| /θ/ and /ð/ (th) | Neither exists in Japanese; often replaced with /s/ or /z/. | think → sink, they → zay, three → free |
| /v/ vs /b/ | Japanese has no /v/; it becomes /b/. | vote → boat, very → berry |
| /f/ | Japanese fu is made with the lips, not the teeth. | coffee, food sound blurred |
| /æ/ vs /ʌ/ vs /ɑ/ | Three English vowels map onto one Japanese a. | cat / cut, bad / bud |
| /s/ vs /ʃ/ before i | Japanese si is naturally pronounced shi. | sit → shit, see → she |
Note what is not on this list: having a Japanese rhythm, a Japanese r-colouring, or a Japanese intonation. Those mark you as Japanese. They do not stop anyone understanding you, and they do not lower your score.
The biggest one: extra vowels
If you only have time for one thing, this is the one. It matters more than /r/ and /l/.
Japanese is built from syllables that almost always end in a vowel. English is full of consonants stacked together, and words that stop dead on a consonant. So an English word gets extra vowels inserted to make it sayable:
- stress → su-to-re-su (one syllable becomes four)
- asked → as-ku-to
- milk → mi-ru-ku
- and → an-do
This is the single strongest reason Japanese speakers get asked to repeat themselves. A one-syllable word arriving as four syllables does not sound like an accent — it sounds like a different word, and the listener's ear loses the sentence while it tries to catch up.
Do the same inside clusters. Street is str, not su-to-ri. Say the three consonants with no vowel between them, slowly, then speed up. Slow and correct beats fast and padded.
Rhythm: stress the right syllable
Japanese gives each syllable roughly equal length. English does not: it leans hard on one syllable in a word and rushes the rest. Put the stress on the wrong syllable and a listener may not recognise the word at all — even when every individual sound is correct.
- PHO-to-graph · pho-TOG-ra-pher · pho-to-GRAPH-ic — same root, three different stresses.
- COM-fort-a-ble is three beats in real speech, not five.
- Content words (nouns, main verbs, adjectives) get the stress. Little words (a, the, of, to, is) are said fast and quietly.
This is high-value work: getting stress right makes you dramatically easier to follow, and it costs nothing in accent. You still sound Japanese. You just sound clear.
How to practise so it actually transfers
Reading a list of sounds does nothing. Your mouth has to build a new habit, and you need to hear yourself.
- Record yourself. You cannot hear your own pronunciation while you are producing it — your brain hears what it meant to say. Recording is the only honest mirror.
- Work on one sound per week, not six. Pick from the table above, in the order that hurts most: extra vowels first, then whichever contrast changes real words for you.
- Use minimal pairs. Say rice / lice, think / sink, vote / boat until someone else — or a machine — can tell them apart from your voice alone.
- Practise in sentences, not words. A sound you can produce in isolation but lose in a sentence is not learned yet.
- Check, don't guess. Self-assessment of pronunciation is unreliable for everyone. Get something to tell you which sounds a listener actually missed.
Aflo listens to your answer and scores it sound by sound, then tells you which specific sounds were hardest to catch — so you practise the four that matter instead of the forty that don't. It also holds a floor for accent, so a clear Japanese-accented voice is not marked down for being Japanese.
For the test, and for real life
For the exam, the target is narrow and achievable: be easy to understand. Fix extra vowels and word stress, fix the one or two contrasts that change words you actually use, and stop there. Nothing else pays.
Outside the exam, you may have a different goal. If you personally want to sound more American or more British — for work, for confidence, for pleasure — that is a completely legitimate project, and books like Ann Cook's American Accent Training are a genuinely good way to do it. Just be clear which project you are doing. Accent work is for you. Intelligibility work is for your score.
Your accent is not a defect. Plenty of people speak clear, professional, high-scoring English with one. Clarity is the part you can work on; the accent can stay.
Frequently asked questions
Will my Japanese accent lower my IELTS or TOEFL speaking score?
No. Speaking tests score intelligibility — whether a listener can understand you easily — not how native you sound. Aflo's pronunciation scoring has an explicit floor so that differences which are simply accent stop affecting the score. What lowers a score is being hard to follow: inserted vowels, wrong word stress, and sounds that turn one word into another.
What is the single most useful thing to fix?
Extra vowels. Japanese syllables end in vowels, so English words get padded — 'stress' becomes 'su-to-re-su'. A one-syllable word arriving as four syllables is what most often makes listeners lose the sentence. Practise stopping your mouth on the final consonant.
Do I really need to fix /r/ and /l/?
Only if it changes words you actually say. It is worth fixing because English has many real minimal pairs (rice/lice, play/pray, correct/collect), so a listener can genuinely hear the wrong word. But it is less urgent than extra vowels and word stress.
How do I know which sounds to work on?
You cannot reliably hear your own pronunciation — you hear what you intended. Record yourself and get an external check. Aflo compares your speech to the expected pronunciation one sound at a time and reports the specific sounds a listener was most likely to miss.