Why Improving Your Accent Gets Harder Over Time

If you’ve been working on your English pronunciation, you might have noticed something frustrating: in the beginning, progress feels quick and exciting—but after a while, it seems like you’re putting in the same effort without seeing much change. You’re not imagining it. There’s a reason why accent improvement slows down over time.

The Early Stages: Big Gains With Less Effort

When you first start reducing your accent, the improvements are clear. Maybe certain sounds from your native language—like th in “think” or “this”—make your English harder to understand. By focusing on these obvious problem sounds, you can see dramatic progress fairly quickly.

At this stage, each improvement feels huge. Fixing just one or two key sounds might make your accent 50–70% clearer. You sound noticeably better, and that motivates you to keep going.

The Middle Stages: Refining and Building Habits

Once you’ve mastered the basics, you move on to other sounds or patterns that still reveal your non-native accent. These take more time and practice, but you can still feel the difference as your speech becomes smoother and more natural.

It’s normal, though, for old mistakes to slip back in during challenging situations—like learning new vocabulary, starting a new job, or speaking under pressure. That doesn’t mean you’ve failed; it just means those habits need more reinforcement until they stick permanently.

The Advanced Stages: Tiny Gains With Big Effort

Here’s where most learners feel stuck. When your accent already sounds 90–95% native-like, the remaining issues are tiny. They might be subtle pronunciation patterns, rhythm differences, or even just a handful of tricky words.

The challenge is that these small details take much more work to identify and correct—and the improvement may only be 1–2%. That’s why advanced learners sometimes feel they’re not making progress, even though they are.

Plus, the more advanced you get, the harder it becomes to pinpoint what sounds off. To make things trickier, non-native speakers often can’t hear that something sounds off in their own speech at all. This is where outside help becomes essential—having someone else give you precise, constructive feedback can save you months of frustration.

The Bottom Line
Accent reduction follows the law of diminishing returns.

Beginning: Small effort → big results
Middle: Moderate effort → steady progress
Advanced: High effort → small refinements

If you’re feeling stuck, remember this is normal. The closer you get to a native accent, the more subtle and challenging the improvements become. Keep practicing, celebrate how far you’ve already come, and know that even tiny refinements make a big difference over time.

And depending on where you’re at in your journey, my group coaching program might be a great place to start. In it, you’ll get feedback, guidance, and a clear plan for your next steps—so you’re not left guessing what to work on.

Good luck on your accent reduction journey!

Jess | Accent Coach

P.S. Here is a YouTube video where I talked about about this