Search results for 'tag:Nouns tag:British accent' matching tags 'Nouns' and 'British accent'

Please comment on and correct on my writing

Raen — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:47:41 GMT

I don't know what I'd call it. Not an essay, there's no arguement techinically, just an opinion. I wrote it as a practice in writing racticing rather than voicing an opinion, although every bit of it is genuin. I had trouble deciding on the name for the subject matter, but this name, "Collocation, the adjective-noun part", is the best I could do. There must be a name for it, because it exists. Please review it, and correct for grammars and comment on the wording, style, conciseness, clarity ect.....I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

Form over substance:

for the eager and unsuspecting

Callocation, the adjective-noun part..beware of it.

It stands next to a phony foreign accent, the #1 suspect, in the lineup of "phoniness". Callocation is a by-product of the end result of one's learning of the language and becomes part of their voice. Assuming it and use it as your own is like picking up somebody's spit from his dinner, putting it in your mouth and chewing it so deliberately as if to convince the spewer how tasteful and delicious it is. That's just embarrassing, if not downright nasty. So before you drill the list of callocation into your already overwhelmed head and use it the next chance your have, think twice, it will betray you and tip you off.

What makes the hair on the back of my neck shoots up from its root more than anything else is when I hear my country fellowmen and women mimic a native speaker's personal property: the tone, the voice, ..and you've got it, the callocation! Using the expression like "a stunning beauty" time after time is annoying as if there's no other degree of beauty. That's for John, the native speaker next door, who uses it to describe any woman that breathes and happens to walk by. I rather you just say beauty and let me decide on what adjective to use to modify the noun based on the merit of the girl's beauty in question. In fact, I'd be more impressed if you say "a cucumber-white beauty", because that expression of originality conjures up in the brain of any Chinese a vivid image of a beautiful girl with smooth, clear and translucent white skin that we Chinese, men or women, obssess over ever so perversely. Show Originality, speak in your own voice, then I'll take you seriously when you want to tell me about the Angelina Jolie, I'll take you at your words that are your own. If I want to listen to John, I'd go talk to him myself.

As a foreigner, mimicking the fixed verbiage without reserve will stifle the little creativity you have left from learning the strigent rules of grammar. Your speech should not only convey your thoughts, your opinions, your views but also reflect your personality. Resist the temptation to speak LIKE a native, rather speak like an original with an accent (if you can't shake it, most of us can't) in your own voice. No matter how well you think you handle callocation, you're still copycatting it. You know it, I know it, even the cat standing and meowing next to you knows it, cats themselvies can smell a copycat right off the bat. So be original, be yourself. If you're still at the stage of mastering the skill of combining dependent clauses into one sentence, please do not say "crystal clear" or "stark contrast", simply "clear" and "contrast" would be sufficient for you.

Learning a foreign language is not about showing it off by using certain flashy verbiage that you drap over the substance of your speech, and how much you can sound like a native speaker using a borrowed voice. It is ultimately about learning to communicate, to tell people what you think, see, feel and hopefully in the process they understand who you are. Don't overlearn fixed verbiage such as callocation (the adjective-noun part), know it's there and that's that. Native speakers use it and sound awsome becaus they own it, it's their birth right.

Unless you're already there when callocation flows freely and naturally from your mouth to your speech, your thoughts to your text, deliberate and pre-mature use of it can be as hard on the ears as Modonna's British accent. So skim thru the list of callocation somebody kindly compiled, just so you know it's out there. But don't drill it, if you have to drill it into your head, it doesn't belong to you. If it doesn't belong to you, don't use it. Callocation will come to you in its own term, so haste not and be real. Rene Descartes said this famous wisdom: "I think, therefore I am." And I'd say, using my first neologism:

You phonify, then you are not.

Re: How can I catch an american accent?

Kakaiyu — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 21:01:34 GMT

Before I tell you any advice, I think that you should know that some Amercans find an accent incredibly sexy. I can understand that you want to blend in, but don't beat your self upabout it if you can't completely perfect your accent.

Okay, now, to improve your accent I think it might be beneficial if you watched material that had both American and British accents being spoken side-by-side. I think it would help because you could kind of "compare" the accents, almost side-by-side, and the differences might stand out more if you hear an American accent saying something immediately after you have heard a British accent saying it. The only thing I can think of right now is the movie "Marie Antoinette" directed by Sofia Coppola, which has actually been criticized because it has a mixture of British, American, and French accents.

You probably know these colloquial abbreviations and conjunctions, but I'll put them anyways just in case. You should probably have a person with a native American accent tell you how to pronounce these, since they would probably sound really odd pronounced wrong :
kind of = kinda (pronounced KIND-uh)

the = (pronounced like "thuh word", though NEVER spelled this way, and sometimes, even "th'noun")

sort of = sorta (can be pronounced either sor-duh or SOR-duh)

What do you, What are you = watchya ("Watchya think?" "Watchya going to do?") (pronounced WUT-chya)

What do you = can also be called whaddaya ("Whaddaya going to do?") (pronounced WUH-duh-yuh)

doing = doin' (pronounced DOO-in)

Re: Have a question about British accent.

Guest — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 04:59:21 GMT

A couple of points.

1) I have a suggestion as to the reason why people from the u.s. think they have an enormous variety of accents, but no-one else does. This could be due to the typical u.s. insular, isolationist attitude which means they are often ignorant of the outside world in a number of ways. A good example of this being their regular failure to distinguish between British, Australian and New Zealand accents, so much so that I've actually seen a few jokes and allusions to this in productions involving any of the aforementioned nationalities. Because of this, people from the u.s. don't have the same idea of what an accent is. A dictionary definition that closely resembles mine is something to the effect of "a distinct manner of speech". To my mind at least, pronouncing a few words slightly differently and/or using a few different nouns does not constitute two separate, distinct accents. As such, this is why I generally refer to an "american accent". If I was being generous I could maybe come up with a few, such as "new york & whichever the surrounding area(s) are that are similar)", "bible belt (I think americans themselves refer to this as southern or south western)", "surfer/annoying teenager (often heard uttering "Oh my God, like, whatever, dude" etc.), possibly California or Florida" and finally, "the rest". This is off the top of my head and as I say, I'm being generous, I wouldn't really call them distinct accents normally. If you want to hear accents, I suggest you spend ten minutes talking to a Cockney, then a Scouser, followed by someone from the West Country, then Northern Ireland, then a Yorkshireman, a Welshman, a Geordie, an Orkney Islander, a Brummie, a Glaswegian and finally, HM Queen Elizabeth II (although she's been dumbing down her accent in recent years), and those are just the few most distinct ones I can think of off the top of my head. These are what I call accents because everything is pronounced differently, not just certain words, also, the sentence structure used by a Yorkshireman and especially someone from the West Country can be decidedly "non-standard". Finally, some of the words used by Scotsmen and Irishmen (generally from Celtic/Gaelic languages) as well as the rhyming slang of the Cockneys, haven't necessarily filtered throughout the entire country, let alone the world, so you may struggle to know exactly what they're talking about.

2) Yanks cannot do British accents (and by "British" I obviously mean RP and Cockney. Not that they can do other British accents, just that they've never tried). This might be for similar reasons to 1). If highly paid hollywood "stars" with the best speech therapy money can buy can't manage it, I doubt "average Joe" can. Brad Pitt was desperate to appear in Guy Ritchie's next film after seeing Lock, Stock, but Guy discovered that no matter how hard he tried, Brad couldn't manage a British accent. Brad had to be the pikey fighter, even though he was worried about being typecast so soon after Fight Club, because no-one could really question his accent. Having said that, recently Angelina Jolie did a surprisngly adequate accent in the Tomb Raider film. Which reminds me, what did you americans think of Daniel Craig?

Chameleon - Your knowledge about life anytime other than the present, and how languages develop is shocking.

Xam0 - Your attempts at phonetic spelling are strange. I'm sure you don't say "dog, frog, kat, mat, map and hat", I've never heard any american pronounce them like that.

YoungCalifornian - The theory that Americans have superior diction to Britons is hilarious and patently untrue, unless of course the person who came up with it only had experience of the Mockneys of "EastEnders".

Trevor

Re: meaning please

moijelesuis — Sun, 07 Sep 2003 06:13:51 GMT

tricky indeed...

first of all, affect is always a verb. it means to bring on or cause a change, or to cause emotion, to provoke feelings (good or bad). it can also mean to adopt a false characteristic.

examples:
many people drive dangerously, but this does not affect me, since i don't even have a car. (affect means there is no effect to the cause - no relation between the bad drivers and myself)

i cried when i saw the film "shindler's list". the film affected me deeply. (it touched me, it made me cry.)

effect can be either a noun or a verb. as a noun, it means the result of something (cause and effect).

he affected a british accent even though everyone knew he was american.

ex:
unemployed workers are a direct effect of factory closures.

as a verb, it means the same thing as the verb "effectuate", which means to bring about, to accomplish.

ex:
when the government effected tax cuts, everyone received a larger paycheck.

(the two words affect/effect are closely related ... one could say something to the effect of: "we were all deeply affected when the government effected a tax increase.")