About Ryan

I'm Ryan Chappell, the coach behind Accent Forge.

My path into this started years ago in a university anthropology course on linguistics. Something about how communication actually works, what makes it land or fail, stuck with me. I started out as an ESL teacher, and over time I noticed a real gap. Advanced students who had gone as far as general English could take them still needed a final layer of polish to move confidently into customer facing or presentation heavy roles. Most ESL teachers understand pronunciation, but not how an accent actually forms, or how to work with it directly. That gap is where Accent Forge started.

Alongside teaching, I have also built and run successful businesses of my own, which shapes how I coach, practical, results focused, and built to actually work in a professional setting. I have been coaching accent reduction specifically for the last four years, and it has become the center of my work.

Here is the thing most people get wrong about accents: everyone has one, including me. Nobody speaks from nowhere. The goal was never to erase that, it is to understand exactly how you are shaping sound, and where you actually have flexibility to shape it differently. That only comes from real awareness, which is why the Baseline works the way it does, a guided starting point built on recognition, not a generic score.

I live and work across language and culture every day in Chiang Mai, so I don't coach accent reduction as an outside observer, I live inside the same questions I ask my students to think about.

I work with professionals from Chiang Mai, Thailand, but the coaching happens wherever you are.