At this point in time I’m in the middle of my British accent learning mission, and here’s what I’ve been doing ever since I announced this mission a month ago:
- I’ve been doing extensive research online in order to find out all the necessary information about how vowels, consonants and also words are pronounced by speakers of British English;
- I’ve been engaging in a lot of active film and TV program watching. ‘Active’ means I’m not just watching and listening; I’m also imitating actors, TV hosts and documentary narrators so that my speech is constantly getting exercised;
- I’ve been reading aloud to cement all those British speech patterns into my mind and make them my second nature;
- And I’ve also been doing a lot of self-practice by verbalizing my thoughts and just saying random things to get used to the British accent.
Personally I feel quite confident about the progress of my Received Pronunciation and now I find it much easier to get into a British English speaker’s mind-set when I’m having my practice sessions.
There’s only one tiny little problem though, and it concerns my pitch of voice rather than the pronunciation itself.
To put it simply, it’s not that easy for me to find my normal voice when putting on the Received Pronunciation. Every now and then I would catch myself speaking in a much higher pitched voice than normally, and I have to make a conscious effort to lower it.
When I do lower my voice, however, it kind of seems that it doesn’t sound right.
For some reason or another it just seems to me that speaking in a different voice is part of the transformation in order to sound like a British person!
So I’m yet to find the perfect balance between my own voice and the British speaker I want to represent. Basically I have to find the British speaker within me, and that’s what I’m going to be focused upon in the immediate future.
So, this was my short video update on my Received Pronunciation accent learning mission, and you can definitely expect more updates of a similar nature in the near future!
Thanks for tuning in, and see you soon my friends!
Chat soon,
Robby 😉
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