Casual Conversation

I have a super weird relationship with my voice. I kinda hate it but I love how easily it passes as fem to other people.

I don't like my voice recorded or just listening to myself while speaking. The recording is a lot worse. Also, my normal voice varies a fair bit depending on context. I'll sometimes go lower-pitch when talking on the phone, for example, or go higher pitched when talking at work when caught off guard.

I'm only fluent in English, but I'll still sometimes make mistakes like blurring the line between Ls and Rs more typical of speakers of languages like Japanese.

The "accent" is completely normal; every language we know changes a wee bit how we use all the other languages. Even the native ones¹. Linguists call it "language transfer", or "linguistic interference".

Do you get an accent if you don’t use a language often then try to talk in it again? Is that even a thing?

I think it's the opposite: your Cantonese is interfering on your English more, not because you've been using English less, but because you've been using Cantonese more. If for some reason people in your home decided to speak something else among yourselves, you'd get that Cantonese interference being slowly replaced with interference from the new language.

I fucking hate my voice… // Do y’all like your voice?

No, I bloody hate my own recorded voice too. The pitch feels really off.

I think it's fairly normal to hate it though. It's not just the mismatch between hearing it "through the skull" vs. "from the outside", but also because our own internal "abstraction" interferes on it.

For example. Let's say you're saying "wug"² /wʌg/. Then you record it, and you realise you aren't really pronouncing it as [wɐg], it's more like [wəɣ] or [ʋɐg] or even [ɰʌ:]. Everyone was hearing you pronounce it a bit slurred, but you don't notice it yourself because inside your head it's crystal clear.

If this worries you, don't — it's like this for every single body out there.

1. Anecdote time: people sometimes ask me where I'm from, in the city my family has been living for four gens, because my Portuguese got some "accent". This bugged me for some time, so I investigated it further and... to keep it short, it's a bunch of phonetic features from my second language, Italian. That I started learning when I was, like, 8yo? 10yo? It's fairly subtle though, non-Southerners are quick to point out my thick Southern accent, it's only other Southerners who ask me where I'm from.
2. "Wug" is a nonsense word. I'm just using it for the example.

I love my voice but only after a lot of people said they liked my voice.

Acting classes are a good way of finding control over your voice and wrangling it into something you like. You can also read to animals, if you have a shelter that supports it. It lets you do funny voices and as long as you have fun the animals like it too.

Good luck accepting you for you. It is one of the most challenging things anyone can do and it is never easy.

Pretty common to not like your own recorded voice. The Nature of Things has a short episode about it.

I like my recorded voice because for some reason the phenomenon where your voice sounds deeper due to it vibrating your skull making extra bass is broken in me. My recorded voice sounds deeper and once I heard that I started hating my ear heard voice.

Similarly, I talk in an accent that I don't hear when I speak. So, not only do I hate the tone of my own voice on playback, but I also have a stupid yokel accent. It's bad all 'round! ;-)

i hate it as well lol

Your voice on phone calls/recordings is actually pretty distorted unless you've got a nice recording setup. You have the problem of distortion/compression in recordings and bone conduction when speaking.

The best way to see how your voice sounds in a natural environment with no digital distortion is to hold a piece of cardboard on either side of your head in front of your ears so that they stick out perpendicular to the sides of your head. Manila folders work great for this. Then talk. You'll hear yourself in a way that's closer to how other people hear you, though it won't get rid of the bone conduction.

No, I do not like my voice in voice recordings. I am perfectly fine with voice in my head, probably got used to it due to constant internal monologue I have, but in voice recordings I hate it (except for when I try to imitate mongolian throat singing I kinda can tolerate it and when I meow)

I hate my voice too.

I hear my stlien accent a lot more in recordings and how nasally my voice is and it’s always a surprise

I think I sound like a baby adult idiot.

I think that's a pretty typical reaction. I don't like my real voice either. There's always this expectation vs reality thing going on, where your brain is just upset that a part of you doesn't seem right.

Do you get an accent if you don't use a language often then try to talk in it again? Is that even a thing?

I think yes. I was raised in 3 languages, but am living in one country for 30 years now.

In my head, i "talk" the other languages fluently. It gets bad, when i actually try talking the language again. Nowadays people ask where I'm from, after one sentence.