Hello, my name is Robby, and I’m a foreign English speaker – as you can definitely tell by my foreign accent in the video above!
Are you a foreign English speaker as well? If so, you’ll definitely find this blog very entertaining because I’m going to attempt to learn various English language accents from all around the world ❗
You see, my personal belief is that as far as you speak clearly and people understand you, accent and pronunciation play a secondary role. My own English pronunciation is made up of American, Irish and East-European accents, but I couldn’t care less because I can speak English fluently and that’s what matters most.
The reason why I’m going to learn American, British, Irish, Australian and other English accents is to prove that accent learning is just another acquired skill and that in order to sound like a native English speaker you don’t have to focus on reducing your own native accent.
I believe the reality is quite simple in fact – you just have to learn how English words are spoken by a certain group of native English speakers, and by listening and repeating the whole accent and pronunciation thing becomes much easier to learn!
By now I have experimented a little bit with American and Irish pronunciation and from what I can tell, learning to speak English with a certain accent seems like a realistic and manageable task, and I’ll start my first accent learning mission very soon.
My First Accent Mission – General American Pronunciation!
For a while I couldn’t really decide which accent I should go for and I was hesitating between the American and Irish pronunciation. American because it’s the most popular pronunciation judging by what I’ve been reading online and Irish because I live in Ireland myself.
Well, eventually I decided to give the American pronunciation a go so that’s what I’m going to do within the next couple of months here on AccentAdventure.com!
Of course, there is no such thing as an American accent; instead we have to talk about dozens of different accents depending on the geographical location. President Obama, for example, speaks with a Midwest accent, Robert de Niro is a New Yorker, and then there’s the Southern accent, Californian… And then of course, there are hundreds of different accents branching out from the main ones, but as you can imagine I can’t start my first accent learning mission with something very specific!
That’s why my first mission is to learn the General American Pronunciation which can be equalled to the British Received Pronunciation in terms of being considered the standard broadcast and media language of the country. Basically within the next couple of months I want to be able to speak English in a way so that anyone can immediately tell that I sound like an American English speaker!
I’m going to post plenty of my accent progress videos here on my blog, and you’ll be able to follow my accent adventures, comment on them and hopefully learn from my experiences!
So stay tuned and we’ll meet again in the first video of my General American Pronunciation mission!
Chat soon,
Robby 😉
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