By Consonants, Accents

I 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,...

Hi,yes, I remember you asked about him. I'm not an expert at all, but I can tell you my opinion, as a learner.I agree it's a good accent for those who are interested in British English. I don't find any annoying features in his accent (=features I don't like). It doesn't...

That what I call a "British accent that doesn't sound awful, affected, formal", so an accent that I like. Good choice! The good thing I noticed right away was his glottal stops instead of T's. And T's are not pronounced at the end of a word either. The other consonants are...

I want to ask 2 questions about pronunciation first: 1) Do Americans say /use-d/ or /use-t/ in used to? 2) I saw Ann Cook wrote this in American Accent course: If the first consonant is voiced, the next one will be as well. If the first one is unvoiced, the second one will sound unvoiced, no...

James- I think the differences all could be accounted for by dialect. In American English, I have been taught that the only syllabic consonants are l and n, but not m. all of the words above such as london and gordon could be pronounced with a syllabic consonant. The determinant for any sc is...

Yes, there are regional variations in American English. Do you know which accent is chosen by MW as the reference in the pronunciation keys. Is it General American?My problem is that, as I have mentioned before, they are indeed denoted differently in British English. The first one is a simple...

Yep, it is possible, but I believe you have to use both languages equally, with more or less the same frequency. Otherwise I think you will end up being less fluent in the language you use less, and the language you use the most is likely to affect the accent of the other (example: if I speak...

Hi Kooyeen, I grew up in New England, where they used to say the "Boston" accent was the purest, but now that I'm in California, Boston really sounds dumb. If I understand T-tapping, I'd answer, "no." I was taught to say "arithmetic" with a full...

Hi, those two vowels are the same to me. The only difference between "how's" and "house" is the final consonant. I think this is true for both General American and the kind of British English that is usually learned. I don't know if there are people who make a distinction or situations where a...

Hi Kooyeen, Sounds like a good question for CJ. I haven't been to MW but plan to go. Mr. M got me some information there which I'd been unable to find elsewhere. I gather from your examples they use what I've heard called phonetic spelling, rather than the phonetic symbols I've seen on this...