http://www.englishforums.com/search/pro.htm?q=tag%3aAccents+tag%3aParagraphs+tag%3aVowelsSearch results for 'tag:Accents tag:Paragraphs tag:Vowels' matching tags 'Accents', 'Paragraphs', and 'Vowels'en-USCSMOD (Build: 3273.32735)http://www.englishforums.com/English/LearnBristishAccent/glrrp/post.htm#555184Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:12:47 GMT946f00bb-57d3-4b7b-a9a2-059b5341af52:555184anonymousI am very talented with accents but I have had to accept the fact that I am getting older and the ability to imitate an accent is diminishing I am a native speaker of standard mid western American English considered to be accent free in the US I speak Spanish with several regional accents due to spending summers as a child in Mexico with relatives then I lived 12 years in Miami and developed quite a heavy Caribbean accent and could pass as a Cuban I learned quite fluent German at age 20 23 when I was stationed in Germany with the US Army but I have a slight accent because of what I mention in the next paragraph rhythm and music I live in Israel now and although I do not use American vowels and consonants in Hebrew it is the rhythm or music as they say which gives me away At the end of the day you must admit that it is WHAT you say and that it should be kind and with a good heart Someone could be the most talented foreign language learner in the world and could learn to speak those languages perfectly without foreign accent but this person is a horrible and says nasty things I think we would love and respect the foreign accent spoken by the kind well meaning person It is not the accent but the thought that counts Remember that http://www.englishforums.com/English/PronounceMiddleWord/dklrh/post.htm#302879Mon, 11 Dec 2006 19:34:55 GMT946f00bb-57d3-4b7b-a9a2-059b5341af52:302879kooyeenHi this is interesting it reminds me of something I read in a book for improving pronunciation the famous American Accent Training The title of the paragraph is Spoon or Sboon She the author say Say spoon Now say sboon Hear how they sound the same This is similar to your p b problem Anyway I disagree spoon and sboon sound similar to me but not the same and people say spoon not sboon She go on saying Hear how they sound the same This is why I d like you to always convert the preposition to to duh when you are speaking no matter what comes before it voiced or unvoiced sound I have to disagree again I don t think to becomes duh after unvoiced consonants Examples Way duh go ok vowel sound I need duh know that ok voiced consonant To be or nod duh be I don t think so I think it s simply To be or not to be In the book however she explicitly write in the phonetic transcription T bee r nah d bee In the end that paragraph was one the ones I didn t pay too much attention to But maybe she s right and I m just a bad sutdent not willing to listen to teachers http://www.englishforums.com/English/WhichAccent/dkhmx/post.htm#301934Fri, 08 Dec 2006 17:52:06 GMT946f00bb-57d3-4b7b-a9a2-059b5341af52:301934marvin a.To tell you the truth I ve never heard any foreigner unless they learned English when they were very young or had lived in an English speaking country for at least a decade and had extensive and personalized accent coaching ever be able to pull off either an American or British accent British English and American English consist of 3 parts accent spelling and lexicon As for accent when people learn an American accent they learn what is known as General American an accent based on a generalized Midwestern accent spoken in the 1950 s Narrowly definied this accent is only spoken by very old speakers 80 year olds in the Midwestern and Western portions of the US and in a couple of 90 year olds in Canada Broadly defined it is spoken by everyone in the Midlands US the North Central US North Dakota and surrounding areas the Western US and Western and Central Canada BC to ON It is also spoken by many newscasters If they learn Received Pronunciation then they learn sort of the upper class sounding accent in England that is considered overly posh to some Both RP and GA are very much alike except in the overall place of articulation As a speaker of North American English it would be very difficult for me to pull of a convincing RP accent I would need long and intensive accent coaching Even actors are notorious for doing very lousy RP accents There is however something called a Mid Atlantic accent which is very easy to do It sounds exactly like a British RP accent to Americans and exactly like an American accent to British people It uses the American vowels and consonants which correspond to British ones but uses the American place of articulation If you aren t a native speaker of English unless you honestly do sound like a native speaker most people won t be able to even tell if you are speaking American English or British English It just depends on how your own non native accent compares to an American or British accent For example almost every Japanese speaker I ve met learned American English but they sounded like they were speaking British English The reason was simply that they could not make the vowel sound that exists in the word hat nor could they make even a reasonable approximation of the North American English retroflex final r Thus even though they learned American English they sounded just as British as they sounded American So they could have just as easily learned RP and they would have ended up with the same accent So unless you really do have a native sounding accent with no interference from your native accent it is not going to make a bit of difference whether you learn American or British English and if you are so good at imitating accents unlikly you should be able to do them both certainly better than I as a North American can fake an RP accent The next aspect is spelling There s American spelling British spelling Canadian spelling and Australian spelling and New Zealand spelling First of all we have to keep in mind that spelling has nothing to do with pronunciation and the fact that a word spelt in one form of English is pronounced differently in another has nothing to do with spelling The spellings of words are simply national unofficial norms and customs There are two categories high frequency and low frequency words You can often read several pages of text and not have a clue as to where it was written based on the spelling The high frequency words are the most important The low frequency words are written much less frequently and thus people hardly notice if there are differences in the spelling and most people in all of the English speaking countries don t care too terribly much For example the word mIdiv l I have a hard time remembering how to spell this word In American spelling I believe it s spelled midieval or something like that and in British spelling mediaeval I doubt anyone would really care how you spell it this word in fact many Americans spell it the British way because the American version looks ugly So as for these types of low frequency words it really doesn t matter how you spell them The high frequency words on the other hand spelling is much more important You have to remember though that everyone will understand these words just fine whether you use the American British Australian or whatever spelling it s just that some that have not been exposed to the other form will consider the other form incorrect American schoolteachers are a good example of this and they will usually mark your paper if you use say a British spelling to let you know that it s spelled differently in America Most of them don t really care actually they just want to help you I d say it s probably the British who are the most uptight about spelling because they tend not to like Americanisms Canadian English technically has no official spelling Both American and British spellings are accepted but even so there is a general trend in how many people spell words and thus we can say that there is a distinct spelling so anyway the only words that you need to worry about are the high frequency words as for the low frequency words just spell them the British way Americans really won t care and if they do tough If on the other hand you really want to be consistent and spell everything the American way just get Microsoft s en US spell checker Unlike the Canadian or British one there is no controversy regarding Microsoft s en US spell checker and thus it could be said to be the final authority on American spelling I m serious No American would argue with it So the only important words with varients are those of the or our class the er re class and the ize ise class These are the only ones that will get anyone worked up over If I were you simply consider your audience If you re writing for a British audience use our colour honour and re centre and if you re writing primarily for an American audience use or color honor and re center Truthfully it s mainly the British people that get emotional about these words because they don t like to see Americanisms all the time and Americans usually don t care they just either haven t seen the British form before and think it s just a misspelling On those two examples the current trend in Canadian English is to follow the British spelling colour centre When it comes to a few words in American English the British spelling is regarded as classier and thus the following words are often spelled like in British English in the US especially for places Theatre Centre Harbour and Glamour Note it s pretty much only these 4 words especially Theatre You ll find about the same number as Theatres in the US as you ll find Theaters You may find a city Centre although it s less common than Theatre and many businesses use the word Harbour Glamour is far more glamorous than Glamor in fact I don t think I ve seen the word glamor very often When it comes to ize ise words I believe ize is considered correct for all varieties of English ise however is quickly gaining ground in the UK and ize is sometimes even mistakenly assumed to be an Americanism Most newspapers and magazines now use ise for example The Oxford English Dictionary still lists the ize form first I believe that ise is more common in Australia and New Zealand ize is the only acceptable form in the US and Canada although ise is sometimes rarely used in Canada usually by people originally from somewhere else So anyway if I were you I d learn both spelling varients just so you know them the high frequency words are not at all hard to learn Just consider your audience when you re writing and be consistent I m not but I just like to be different for my own personal entertainment Of course I d never hand in paper to a teacher or for anything important using an odd concoction of American and British spellings as people would just think I was a bad speller Do as I say not as I do The third thing to learn is the vocabulary differences You can also just describe what you are talking about or try to use alternate words If I were you I would simply avoid any deliberate Americanisms or Canadianisms or Briticisms or whatever or learn all of them So in conclusion it doesn t matter too terribly much which variety of English you want to learn I myself would suggest that you learn both and what the differences are between them and as long as you don t overwhelm yourself with the differences they re fairly small ultimately if you learn both you can adapt to the person you are talking to and be more easily understood If you want to learn a particular one learn either one it makes absolutely no difference because no one will take you for a Englishman or an American nor will you sound like one or the other to native English speakers You ll still sound like you re speaking German English or Italian English or whatever you are Until people say you sound like a native speaker you needn t worry Besides if you really want to become very proficient in English you ll have to live in an English speaking country for a while and you ll pick up the local accent anyway which more likely than not will not be Upper RP or conservative General American As for speaking in a mix of British and American accents to tell you the truth I doubt many native speakers would notice They ll just be thrilled that you re doing the best you can to try to communicate with them and as long as they can understand you and General American and RP are the most easily understood forms of English for native speakers to understand edited to insert paragraphs to make reading easier http://www.englishforums.com/English/BritishPronounciationAmerican-Pronounciation/7/bjnbj/Post.htm#131521Sun, 28 Aug 2005 17:18:51 GMT946f00bb-57d3-4b7b-a9a2-059b5341af52:131521tallulah tamFelt I had to jump in here with my 2c worth I am British I was educated at an expensive school in Cheltenham in Gloucestershire so I tend to speak that way Although I have lived in The States for almost 20 years most of it in The Deep South I am married to an Englishman and have lost none of my English accent Now I KNOW the expensive word will jump out at everyone in the paragraph above The reason I put that in before I am called all sorts of nasty names is because we definitely had a different accent to the locals or children from other schools We developed a more far back English accent so called because we tend to speak from the back of our throats rather than the front of our mouths as people from the north of England do for instance This tendancy seems to be going out of fashion with the younger generation just listen to the way Prince William and Prince Harry speak compared to their father This accent when I was at school was the favoured BBC accent which seems to have almost disappeared now in the English media Strangely enough it is very favoured over here especially when actors are playing English butlers The Americans in general not the American media are not very discerning when it comes to a British accent They do not seem to be able to tell whether I come from England Wales Scotland or Ireland or even Australia or South Africa They also think variously that I speak like Paul McCartney or Mrs Thatcher The Southern American drawl not South American is quite different from the accent California Jim will have but the majority of English people would not be able to tell the difference We recognize Americans by their monotone or when they say bedder or innerrupted or do not pronounce our unique vowel sound as in what which Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna have gone to great pains to perfect As to which is best the answer is neither From my experience to avoid misunderstanding it is best to adapt ones accent according to the majority When I first came to the States I remember going to buy a pen as a gift for someone I was directed by the sales person to the kitchen department to buy a pan All the different American and English accents give the language variety and colour The Americans are exceptionally good at making up words and descriptive phrases which sum up exactly what you want to say bummer is a good one I use a lot