You’ve explained it perfectly. Accent and pronunciation are not synonymous. My mother language is Spanish, and even though I still don’t sound like a native English speaker, my accent is quite understandable and doesn’t pose a problem in communication. I’d say that’s the main goal foreigners should focus on.
You are perfectly correct. Pronunciation and accent are not used interchangeably. American accent is different from the British accent, it is obvious. I can listen to a person and from the accent say where he or she comes from. In Ghana, we learn British English, but all the tribes here speak English differently, due to cultural interference. The same British English is taught in Schools, but each tribe speaks it differently. This is a clear case of accent not pronunciation due to cultural interference.
Now I really understood why they are no dialects in certain languages. E.g. in the Hungarian language, there are only very small variations in pronunciation, even though it is spoken by many people outside the motherland. In Hungarian, the accent is always at the beginning of the word, so there is not much variation there. On the other hand, the end of words cannot and should not be pronounced uncertainly, because that is where the grammatical place and function of the words is decided. So every word must be pronounced correctly from beginning to end. The less true these two properties are in a language, the more variations and dialects the language has.
well thank you for explaining it was useful. what about teachers. I'm trying to become a teacher and I was thinking a lot to learn American pronunciation and trying to acquire the accent. is this good or not
What I don't understand is, if you can pronounce a word technically wrong as a result of your accent, aren't there relatively more accurate accents? Or if your accent causes you to mispronounce a word, doesn't that make your accent wrong?
