I started taking accent reduction lessons with Fern in January 2015. As a student taking some acting classes in English, it is important for me to have a good pronunciation and, in some cases, sound as American as possible. After reviewing the IPA system and various other elements of the sound system, we went over different monologues and plays. Fern was very successful at pinpointing my pronunciation errors and breaking them down for me so I don’t make them again.
Her knowledge about French – my native language – and other languages has also made me feel safe and understood: she knows what it is like to learn the pronunciation of a foreign language.
Fern has a wonderful personality. She is full of life and knowledge, knows much about different cultures, and is beyond excited to share it all with her students. Prior to working on my accent with her, I remember how interesting our very first phone conversation was. At that moment, I already knew that Fern was the accent reduction coach that I needed.
Thanks to Fern, not only my accent has been reduced, I also have gained so much confidence in my speaking skills. And all of that has been done with an extraordinarily gifted teacher. I could not be more grateful.
I have been a patient of Fern Hanover for the past half year. This followed similar work with three other therapists in previous semesters. Though I am not an expert in the field, I have had 19 years of experience in academia and this gives me a foundation to write this letter of evaluation.
I have been highly impressed by Ms. Hanover’s professional abilities. Simply put, she is one of the most gifted teachers I have ever met. She had an excellent way of inspiring people and enlivening instruction and practice. She is tireless, patient, good natured, and motivating. In terms of substance, she is informative, knowledgeable, and interesting. I have learned from her much more than from her predecessors, so that I could understand the cause of my problem and how to alleviate it. She made sessions that would otherwise be tedious into fun and into a learning experience with her good cheer, high intelligence, and subject matter interest. I have greatly benefited.
Ms. Hanover’s professional standards of preparation and reliability seemed to me, as a patient, consistently high and meticulous.
I can recommend Ms. Hanover strongly and unreservedly. If you have additional questions, please let me know.
This letter is my personal recommendation for Fern Hanover. Fern has helped me reduce my accent and polish my presentation skills for the past six months. I found her to be consistently pleasant, tackling all subtle issues with dedication and patience.
Being multilingual, Fern is able to identify particular pronunciation difficulties of different language speakers. She has successfully developed several techniques for me to learn the correct English pronunciation. I am a financial analyst and I need to give presentations at work and talk to institutional investors over the phone, and Fern has helped me feel a lot more comfortable speaking in public since I started working with her.
Fern has a very systematic approach when it comes to accent reduction. She started with basic phonetic rules and then she focused on intonation by using daily dialogues. I found it extremely practical and effective.
Fern has done an excellent job and I would highly recommend her for any position in your company.
I am a Japanese teacher of English and took Fern’s accent reduction course. She helped me improve my pronunciation in an enjoyable way – sometimes she merrily sang songs to demonstrate correct English sounds. What is the most remarkable with her is her ability to perceive the slightest difference in phonemes. She could quickly discriminate my accented pronunciation and reproduce the same sound accurately. In this way, I could find the problems with my own pronunciation. What’s more, it is fun to study pronunciation with Fern. I appreciate her cheerful personality.
Ms. Fern Hanover has been my personal accent modification trainer for the last three years. She has used many different methods and materials to enhance my understanding of the English phonetic system in order to correct my articulation. She is very patient and dedicated, and demonstrates her desire to facilitate my success. I have definitely noticed significant improvements in my conversational speech. I will definitely refer her to others, who may be interested in accent modification.
I am from Spain and since coming to the U.S.A. I had wanted to improve my English pronunciation so that others could understand me better, both in the work place and my social life. I felt it was something really hard to do on my own since it’s difficult to distinguish and reproduce sounds that you don’t have in your mother language. That’s why I decided to look for a good speech therapist. I was lucky to find Fern Hanover.
Fern has done a wonderful job modifying my accent and expanding my vocabulary. She has taught me how to classify the sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet and how to move my jaw, lips and tongue to produce each sound. The fact that she pronounces Spanish very well has helped me very much because she would point out the differences between Spanish and English vowels and consonants, making it more clear to me. English has its own rhythm, stress pattern and intonation, and Fern has also helped me modify that part of my speech so my accent sounds less foreign.
She has a great personality and makes learning fun and easy. I would recommend her to anybody who wants to modify their accent, regardless of their English level. There is a lot you can learn from her.
I’m based in Malaysia, and all who have visited or lived in Asia know that most Asian countries have a funny English accent (Minglish in Malaysia, Singlish in Singapore or Chinglish in China). I ended up with a German-Malaysian accent…
I found Fern while browsing the net, looking for somebody who can help me reduce my accent for an upcoming acting gig. Malaysia has no qualified speech therapists in the area of accent reduction and I decided to try my luck online. Since then, Fern and I had several video chats from Germany and Malaysia to New York. And it worked out great!
Fern taught and practiced with me via internet how to improve my accent. I can recommend her without reservation to anybody, wherever in the world they are located. 🙂
Fern is a wonderful instructor. She can quickly and tactically devise a customized learning curriculum for you depending on your unique speech needs. She is very methodological in her approach, and you’ll be surprised by how much progress you make in each session. She is a real pleasure to work with.
I am a Zimbabwean working as an Assistant Vice President at an insurance management company in Bermuda. Before I took Ms. Fern Hanover’s accent reduction course, my friends and peers had difficulties understanding some of the words I said. I spoke English with a heavy foreign accent. My heavy accent was getting in the way of my social and business interactions. My quiet, monotone, glottal-fry voice was not helping the situation, either. In meetings, participants yawned in boredom listening to me speak.
I took Ms. Hanover’s accent reduction course, and she quickly helped me to identify those areas of my pronunciation that were different from those of native speakers of English. She also helped me work on my voice and my accent.
Thank you, Fern, for the patience you had during the two-week crash course. You were meticulous, and I truly enjoyed your methods of teaching and this, indeed, was a life-changing experience.
Last summer I was studying for my USMLE Step 2 Clinical Skills test which involved playing a doctor with actors playing the role of patients. Besides clinical knowledge, results of this test highly depend on your communication and language skills (there is a separate score on English proficiency). I really wanted to improve the clarity of my pronunciation and reduce my Russian accent (probably one of the most difficult to get rid of). After searching the web, Fern’s website and credentials caught my attention, and I never regretted my decision to take her classes. Fern is an incredible professional, multitalented and gifted, who generously shares her knowledge and skills with the students. She creates a very comfortable yet productive class atmosphere, dedicates her utmost attention to every little mistake or imperfection, and effectively and creatively helps you fix them. Besides working on my accent, Fern created a series of exercises for my breathing and voice difficulties, which she diagnosed. Her passion for linguistics and phonetics is quite contagious and makes the class time fly by. Fern’s
classes helped me enormously: I passed my test with the highest English proficiency score, went through a round of residency interviews, and matched into the residency of my choice. Unfortunately, I had to stop taking Fern’s classes due to my schedule restrictions, but am looking forward to continuing as soon at my first opportunity. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for having met such a wonderful teacher as Fern who made a dramatic difference in my life.
I have been working with Fern on my accent and articulation problems. When I came to Fern I had a lisp, spoke very mechanically, and couldn’t pronounce words ending in ‘L’. These things had an effect on my social and professional life.
Fern has helped me with all of those problems. I recently called a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a long time, and she was astonished by the improvement.
Fern is extremely knowledgeable about her field, and gave me very useful exercises to work on at home. She has a wonderful personality and I always look forward to working with her. I recommend her enthusiastically and without reservation to anyone who is looking to improve his speech.
I came from French Guyana to New York to take lessons with Fern Hanover from April 29 to May 6, 2011 to improve my accent and pronunciation of American English.
Fern made me work on the phonemes, which was great because it made me aware of the difficulty I had to pronounce some of them. This intense training, which also included vocal technique and prosody, has been beneficial and invigorating. I now feel more self-confident thanks to Fern, who has been able both to pick out my mistakes and teach me techniques to correct them.
This training will pay in the long run – that is why I plan to go on working with Fern on the internet with web cameras, although nothing could replace the fun I had practicing with her in the flesh!
I have known Fern since 2011 and have worked with her extensively on my accent reduction. I arrived in the U.S. in 1991 when I was fourteen years old and I have retained a heavy Russian accent. I am a senior professional who advises corporate clients in the finance field. I retained Fern’s services to help me with my accent reduction / communication skills. I have attended about 30 coaching sessions with Fern and can state that she is a highly qualified professional in her field. She keeps current with the most advanced training methodology by attending seminars and staying attuned with novel teaching techniques. She is also currently writing her own book on the subject of speech improvement. In addition, she has a kind nature and is an open, likable individual.
I took accent reduction classes for three months with Fern, and think that it was really worthwhile for me. It was a good way to identify my speech weaknesses and improve my speaking and listening skills. I am from Brazil and have been living in the U.S. for almost two years. I was not happy with my accent and I realized that I had problems in hearing and distinguishing some phonemes in English. I didn’t know how many vowel sounds this language has! Of course, I still have, and think I will always have my accent, but I think I am now more comfortable with it, and know better ways to improve it. Plus, now I can understand native speakers of American English better. Fern has an excellent background in the area, and is very well-qualified. It was fun to take classes with her, as well. I totally recommend it!
I originally went to Fern to work on voice projection. She taught me about breath support and good postural alignment, which are essential for optimal projection without straining. I learned how to get sufficient air support to reduce glottal fry, pitch breaks and nasal voice habits. I also asked Fern to coach me for specific presentations that I needed to do for volunteer opportunities and for my work as a lawyer. I have found Fern to be very knowledgeable regarding techniques for improving my voice, and the sessions were always enjoyable. Thank you, Fern!
Fern Hanover is a bundle of energy. She is passionate and knowledgeable and she makes English fun! She has been coaching my pronunciation and intonation patterns, focusing on native speakers’ sounds. I have acquired fluency and better articulation in my speech.
I came to Fern because my first language is Spanish and I never had a formal conversational English training. I am in a leadership position now in my career and I felt that I needed to improve my communication, as sometimes people could not understand certain words I was saying. I first learned with Fern the different basic sounds of native American English, then we moved into intonation of words and now we are working on intonation and speech patterns in conversations. I have been learning what words in a conversation I should stress to deliver a clear message.
Fern is also coaching me for business presentations. I prepared my presentations and then w worked together through the different patterns and how to emphasize key words.
Many thanks, Fern, for your patience and dedication.
Fern has been working with my toddler in the Early Intervention program. With Fern’s careful instruction over the last 7 months I’ve seen my daughter’s speech go from incomprehensible to anyone but her mother, to very clear. Now I regularly hear other adults remark how clearly she speaks. Thank you Fern!
Thank you very much for your kind-hearted lessons. Akihiko likes you and your educational toys, and now he is able to speak a lot of words. When you started the lessons, he was able to speak only three words. What remarkable progress he made!
Fern Hanover provided speech-language therapy services for my daughter,
Maille, over a 10-month period when she was 2 to 3 years old. When we began,
Maille was hardly speaking, and could not be understood well by others. During
the time that Fern was coming for visits, Maille began to speak more and more
and became very understandable. She began to initiate comments and
conversation, asked questions, and responded well. Now she is a chatterbox!
Fern was fun to be with and we enjoyed her company very much. I highly
recommend Fern as a speech-language therapist.
I started taking accent reduction lessons with Fern in January 2015. As a student taking some acting classes in English, it is important for me to have a good pronunciation and, in some cases, sound as American as possible. After reviewing the IPA system and various other elements of the sound system, we went over different monologues and plays. Fern was very successful at pinpointing my pronunciation errors and breaking them down for me so I don’t make them again.
Her knowledge about French – my native language – and other languages has also made me feel safe and understood: she knows what it is like to learn the pronunciation of a foreign language.
Fern has a wonderful personality. She is full of life and knowledge, knows much about different cultures, and is beyond excited to share it all with her students. Prior to working on my accent with her, I remember how interesting our very first phone conversation was. At that moment, I already knew that Fern was the accent reduction coach that I needed.
Thanks to Fern, not only my accent has been reduced, I also have gained so much confidence in my speaking skills. And all of that has been done with an extraordinarily gifted teacher. I could not be more grateful.
Adrien
I have been a patient of Fern Hanover for the past half year. This followed similar work with three other therapists in previous semesters. Though I am not an expert in the field, I have had 19 years of experience in academia and this gives me a foundation to write this letter of evaluation.
I have been highly impressed by Ms. Hanover’s professional abilities. Simply put, she is one of the most gifted teachers I have ever met. She had an excellent way of inspiring people and enlivening instruction and practice. She is tireless, patient, good natured, and motivating. In terms of substance, she is informative, knowledgeable, and interesting. I have learned from her much more than from her predecessors, so that I could understand the cause of my problem and how to alleviate it. She made sessions that would otherwise be tedious into fun and into a learning experience with her good cheer, high intelligence, and subject matter interest. I have greatly benefited.
Ms. Hanover’s professional standards of preparation and reliability seemed to me, as a patient, consistently high and meticulous.
I can recommend Ms. Hanover strongly and unreservedly. If you have additional questions, please let me know.
Sincerely,
Eli
To Whom It May Concern:
This letter is my personal recommendation for Fern Hanover. Fern has helped me reduce my accent and polish my presentation skills for the past six months. I found her to be consistently pleasant, tackling all subtle issues with dedication and patience.
Being multilingual, Fern is able to identify particular pronunciation difficulties of different language speakers. She has successfully developed several techniques for me to learn the correct English pronunciation. I am a financial analyst and I need to give presentations at work and talk to institutional investors over the phone, and Fern has helped me feel a lot more comfortable speaking in public since I started working with her.
Fern has a very systematic approach when it comes to accent reduction. She started with basic phonetic rules and then she focused on intonation by using daily dialogues. I found it extremely practical and effective.
Fern has done an excellent job and I would highly recommend her for any position in your company.
Sincerely,
Jing, CFA
I am a Japanese teacher of English and took Fern’s accent reduction course. She helped me improve my pronunciation in an enjoyable way – sometimes she merrily sang songs to demonstrate correct English sounds. What is the most remarkable with her is her ability to perceive the slightest difference in phonemes. She could quickly discriminate my accented pronunciation and reproduce the same sound accurately. In this way, I could find the problems with my own pronunciation. What’s more, it is fun to study pronunciation with Fern. I appreciate her cheerful personality.
Ikuko
Ms. Fern Hanover has been my personal accent modification trainer for the last three years. She has used many different methods and materials to enhance my understanding of the English phonetic system in order to correct my articulation. She is very patient and dedicated, and demonstrates her desire to facilitate my success. I have definitely noticed significant improvements in my conversational speech. I will definitely refer her to others, who may be interested in accent modification.
Yours truly,
Norman
I am from Spain and since coming to the U.S.A. I had wanted to improve my English pronunciation so that others could understand me better, both in the work place and my social life. I felt it was something really hard to do on my own since it’s difficult to distinguish and reproduce sounds that you don’t have in your mother language. That’s why I decided to look for a good speech therapist. I was lucky to find Fern Hanover.
Fern has done a wonderful job modifying my accent and expanding my vocabulary. She has taught me how to classify the sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet and how to move my jaw, lips and tongue to produce each sound. The fact that she pronounces Spanish very well has helped me very much because she would point out the differences between Spanish and English vowels and consonants, making it more clear to me. English has its own rhythm, stress pattern and intonation, and Fern has also helped me modify that part of my speech so my accent sounds less foreign.
She has a great personality and makes learning fun and easy. I would recommend her to anybody who wants to modify their accent, regardless of their English level. There is a lot you can learn from her.
Sincerely,
Julie
I’m based in Malaysia, and all who have visited or lived in Asia know that most Asian countries have a funny English accent (Minglish in Malaysia, Singlish in Singapore or Chinglish in China). I ended up with a German-Malaysian accent…
I found Fern while browsing the net, looking for somebody who can help me reduce my accent for an upcoming acting gig. Malaysia has no qualified speech therapists in the area of accent reduction and I decided to try my luck online. Since then, Fern and I had several video chats from Germany and Malaysia to New York. And it worked out great!
Fern taught and practiced with me via internet how to improve my accent. I can recommend her without reservation to anybody, wherever in the world they are located. 🙂
Thanks again Fern, Juliane
Fern is a wonderful instructor. She can quickly and tactically devise a customized learning curriculum for you depending on your unique speech needs. She is very methodological in her approach, and you’ll be surprised by how much progress you make in each session. She is a real pleasure to work with.
Faith
I am a Zimbabwean working as an Assistant Vice President at an insurance management company in Bermuda. Before I took Ms. Fern Hanover’s accent reduction course, my friends and peers had difficulties understanding some of the words I said. I spoke English with a heavy foreign accent. My heavy accent was getting in the way of my social and business interactions. My quiet, monotone, glottal-fry voice was not helping the situation, either. In meetings, participants yawned in boredom listening to me speak.
I took Ms. Hanover’s accent reduction course, and she quickly helped me to identify those areas of my pronunciation that were different from those of native speakers of English. She also helped me work on my voice and my accent.
Thank you, Fern, for the patience you had during the two-week crash course. You were meticulous, and I truly enjoyed your methods of teaching and this, indeed, was a life-changing experience.
Regards,
Misheck
Last summer I was studying for my USMLE Step 2 Clinical Skills test which involved playing a doctor with actors playing the role of patients. Besides clinical knowledge, results of this test highly depend on your communication and language skills (there is a separate score on English proficiency). I really wanted to improve the clarity of my pronunciation and reduce my Russian accent (probably one of the most difficult to get rid of). After searching the web, Fern’s website and credentials caught my attention, and I never regretted my decision to take her classes. Fern is an incredible professional, multitalented and gifted, who generously shares her knowledge and skills with the students. She creates a very comfortable yet productive class atmosphere, dedicates her utmost attention to every little mistake or imperfection, and effectively and creatively helps you fix them. Besides working on my accent, Fern created a series of exercises for my breathing and voice difficulties, which she diagnosed. Her passion for linguistics and phonetics is quite contagious and makes the class time fly by. Fern’s
classes helped me enormously: I passed my test with the highest English proficiency score, went through a round of residency interviews, and matched into the residency of my choice. Unfortunately, I had to stop taking Fern’s classes due to my schedule restrictions, but am looking forward to continuing as soon at my first opportunity. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for having met such a wonderful teacher as Fern who made a dramatic difference in my life.
Natalie M., MD
I have been working with Fern on my accent and articulation problems. When I came to Fern I had a lisp, spoke very mechanically, and couldn’t pronounce words ending in ‘L’. These things had an effect on my social and professional life.
Fern has helped me with all of those problems. I recently called a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a long time, and she was astonished by the improvement.
Fern is extremely knowledgeable about her field, and gave me very useful exercises to work on at home. She has a wonderful personality and I always look forward to working with her. I recommend her enthusiastically and without reservation to anyone who is looking to improve his speech.
Sincerely,
Ben
I came from French Guyana to New York to take lessons with Fern Hanover from April 29 to May 6, 2011 to improve my accent and pronunciation of American English.
Fern made me work on the phonemes, which was great because it made me aware of the difficulty I had to pronounce some of them. This intense training, which also included vocal technique and prosody, has been beneficial and invigorating. I now feel more self-confident thanks to Fern, who has been able both to pick out my mistakes and teach me techniques to correct them.
This training will pay in the long run – that is why I plan to go on working with Fern on the internet with web cameras, although nothing could replace the fun I had practicing with her in the flesh!
Pilar
I have known Fern since 2011 and have worked with her extensively on my accent reduction. I arrived in the U.S. in 1991 when I was fourteen years old and I have retained a heavy Russian accent. I am a senior professional who advises corporate clients in the finance field. I retained Fern’s services to help me with my accent reduction / communication skills. I have attended about 30 coaching sessions with Fern and can state that she is a highly qualified professional in her field. She keeps current with the most advanced training methodology by attending seminars and staying attuned with novel teaching techniques. She is also currently writing her own book on the subject of speech improvement. In addition, she has a kind nature and is an open, likable individual.
Irene
I took accent reduction classes for three months with Fern, and think that it was really worthwhile for me. It was a good way to identify my speech weaknesses and improve my speaking and listening skills. I am from Brazil and have been living in the U.S. for almost two years. I was not happy with my accent and I realized that I had problems in hearing and distinguishing some phonemes in English. I didn’t know how many vowel sounds this language has! Of course, I still have, and think I will always have my accent, but I think I am now more comfortable with it, and know better ways to improve it. Plus, now I can understand native speakers of American English better. Fern has an excellent background in the area, and is very well-qualified. It was fun to take classes with her, as well. I totally recommend it!
Sabrina
I originally went to Fern to work on voice projection. She taught me about breath support and good postural alignment, which are essential for optimal projection without straining. I learned how to get sufficient air support to reduce glottal fry, pitch breaks and nasal voice habits. I also asked Fern to coach me for specific presentations that I needed to do for volunteer opportunities and for my work as a lawyer. I have found Fern to be very knowledgeable regarding techniques for improving my voice, and the sessions were always enjoyable. Thank you, Fern!
Isabelle
Fern Hanover is a bundle of energy. She is passionate and knowledgeable and she makes English fun! She has been coaching my pronunciation and intonation patterns, focusing on native speakers’ sounds. I have acquired fluency and better articulation in my speech.
I came to Fern because my first language is Spanish and I never had a formal conversational English training. I am in a leadership position now in my career and I felt that I needed to improve my communication, as sometimes people could not understand certain words I was saying. I first learned with Fern the different basic sounds of native American English, then we moved into intonation of words and now we are working on intonation and speech patterns in conversations. I have been learning what words in a conversation I should stress to deliver a clear message.
Fern is also coaching me for business presentations. I prepared my presentations and then w worked together through the different patterns and how to emphasize key words.
Many thanks, Fern, for your patience and dedication.
Karen
Fern has been working with my toddler in the Early Intervention program. With Fern’s careful instruction over the last 7 months I’ve seen my daughter’s speech go from incomprehensible to anyone but her mother, to very clear. Now I regularly hear other adults remark how clearly she speaks. Thank you Fern!
Julia
Thank you very much for your kind-hearted lessons. Akihiko likes you and your educational toys, and now he is able to speak a lot of words. When you started the lessons, he was able to speak only three words. What remarkable progress he made!
Again, I appreciate you very much.
Toshiko
Fern Hanover provided speech-language therapy services for my daughter,
Maille, over a 10-month period when she was 2 to 3 years old. When we began,
Maille was hardly speaking, and could not be understood well by others. During
the time that Fern was coming for visits, Maille began to speak more and more
and became very understandable. She began to initiate comments and
conversation, asked questions, and responded well. Now she is a chatterbox!
Fern was fun to be with and we enjoyed her company very much. I highly
recommend Fern as a speech-language therapist.
Shelly