#25 British Accent Tips - Speak Like a Native

If you want to improve your British accent, this is the place to be!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hello and welcome to the English with Michael podcast, the best place to come to study English as a second language as well as the practice, the British accent with me, Michael Lavers as your teacher. Hello, welcome to the English with Michael podcast. My name is Michael. Thank you for being here with me this week. So wherever you're listening from, maybe you're on the way to work, you're driving on the train, maybe you're cleaning your house wherever you are. I thank you for coming and

Speaker 2: 0:41

making the effort to improve your English with me today to today, I've got a special episode about British accent. Yes, the British accent, my accent, you know, I have a British accent, not the British accent that I have a British accent because as you know there are many different types of accents in the UK. If you're really interested in this topic, I recommend listening to my first ever podcast podcast number one. I gave lots of advice on the British accent. I spoke about my views on whether getting an accent is important and how you can practice, how you can do it. So I won't repeat myself too much today. So if you want to learn more, I recommend listening to number one as I often like to say, do not forget if you want to read what I'm saying while I'm saying it, you can go to my website to read the transcript for this episode. So this episode will be under the link ewmichael.com/accenttips, accent tips. So this month has been very busy, so fine. It's only is only the beginning of the month, but it's been very busy because I'm planning and preparing for a big trip in November. So I'll be going to Japan for a while. I'll be staying in Osaka and Kyoto, kind of that area. So if anyone happens to be in the area and you want to meet for a coffee or something, you know, I'd be happy to practice English or just, you know, chat with you. I want to meet who's listening to the podcast. Feel free to send me a message. It might be nice to meet up. So let me know. Maybe we could have the first ever English with Michael meetup. That's very weird. But anyway, enough about me. Let's get into the topic today. So yeah, British accent, that's a couple of things I spoke about in the first episode. I did really big things you could do to improve. One of them would be generally pronouncing your T's strongly. We like our tea strong is in the drink, the tea. But also we like the T strong in our words, there's two teeth. So for example, if we say cat, you want to hear that T at the end, cat cat. That's quite a good British thing to do. You will hear many British people omitting the T. They will not include the T. And it's a very kind of casual accent, a very casual thing to do. And it's not very formal. So if you want to sound formal and polite, I recommend avoiding that. But what I mean is that some people might say better meaning better, better. But this is very, very common in the UK. So it's good to be aware of this so you can listen out for that sound. But I think it's better to say better. But even me, you'll notice sometimes when I say the word, but I don't always pronounce the T I say, but I think if you listen carefully is just to be in a year really. But, but so it's really important to be aware of that. If you want to sound polite and formal. I recommend trying to say, but, but I think, okay. But as I said, I won't repeat myself too much, so I want to get to stress the stress of words and also maybe your mouth position too. So one good piece of advice that I heard, which I think is true, it sounds true to me, is that generally in the American accent, they kind of speak like they're smiling all the time. When they say the vowel sounds like a E, maybe their mouth is very wide. If you want to speak like someone from Downton Abbey, you know, very posh. Generally I think the mouth position is more vertical, but you don't smile so much. Like, A E. I. So maybe that's not a perfect rule, but that kind of sounds like a good interesting one to me. Yeah. So the main point of today's episode is to focus on stress. She's a stress of a word is the emphasis or the kind of strength you put into one syllable. And remember a syllable, it just means a sound. So for example, Michael has two syllables, MI and CHAEL appointment has three syllables A point ment. So when you learn a word, learn that the stress as well. Maybe you could do that by just listening to the audio. When you learn it, you know, don't just read it. And this is what many native speakers get wrong too. We always get the stress wrong in words because we only read things but we don't listen to it. So here are some examples where you can hear the stress in the word. Uh, one example is bicycle. Bicycle. This is free syllables, right? Can you hear which syllable has the stress? The answer is by, so it's BI CYCLE. So cycle is very short. We don't say by cycle or by cycle is bicycle. Another example, currently, currently we hear the stress is in the first syllable. Again, currently we don't say currently. How about the word television? Can you work out where the stresses in this word? Yeah, it's the same as last time. It is the first syllable, so TE levision. We don't say television. We say television. Television. Or how about this one? Guarantee, guarantee. He are the stresses at the end so it's guarantee guarantee there it's not in the middle. We don't say guarantee for example. So you can see if you get the stress wrong, it can sound very, very different. Another one where the stress is at the end is understand, understand. So stand has more stress than under understand. Okay, so I'll stop shouting words at you for a second. One thing I learned that was very, very interesting, I just found this out today, is that there are many lone words from French in English and in American English they tend to stress the final syllable. And in British English we stress the first syllable is a really interest. I never noticed this before, but for example, I would say a buffet buffet. So that's the kind of kind of like an all you can eat buffet where you can take food from the table and take it back to your plate in the restaurant. So I would say a buffet. Americans would say the Fe. So both of those are correct. If you want to sound British stress. The first one, another example is dead Bri debris. So this is spelled like debris but the S is silent on the end. So debris is just kind of, for example, after a crash there might be debris over the road, which is the kind of broken pieces of a car or a plane. It's just kind of broken buildings and broken stuff everywhere. Kind of like rubbish over the road. Americans would say debris. So that first vowel, the E, is almost not, there is just debris. And I would say debris. One more example, a very common one. Garage, garage. This is the place that you would park your car inside your house. It's that kind of big car room. I guess. I would say garage, Americans might say garage, garage, something like that. Anyway, I'm not going to try and do an American accent and embarrass myself, but you can see how it's different. So many, many of these words that come from French, if they sound French to you and you want to be British, maybe you can put the stress on the first syllable. It won't always work, but this might be a good rule to follow. So let me know if you can think of any more words that come from French where the stress is different in each accent. That'll be really, really interesting to hear your, what you find as well. So I guess the second important thing to mention about stress is don't be afraid to emphasise important parts. Many other languages compared to English. Do not do this. If you think of like Russian or Spanish, the generally more flat, at least to my ear anyway, I don't really speak Russian or Spanish, but when you talk English, if you listen to how I talk, I put more strength on certain words that I want to emphasise. If we look at this sentence, for example, John, will go to the cinema tonight. You'll notice that I stressed John. So that means I think John is the important part in the sentence. I want to tell you that it's John who's going, maybe not me. John, we'll go to the cinema tonight. If you don't believe me, maybe you think I'm lying then I might want to stress"will". So no, I'm, I'm, I'm telling the truth. John, will go to the cinema tonight. John, will go to the cinema. If I want to stress maybe how he's getting there. Maybe if the question is how is John going there, I will stress the answer to what you want to know. I will stress the verb. I will say John, will walk to the cinema. John will walk to the cinema. If the question is where is John going, I will stress the important part of my answer. So as you can guess, that will be cinema. So John will go to the cinema tonight. John will go to the cinema tonight. So in a way it's kind of making it more clear to the person you're talking to. If the question is when is he going? Of course we want to stress tonight, or maybe you just want to tell people that it's happening tonight. Maybe they don't know when it's happening. So John will go to the cinema tonight, maybe a bit more natural. John will go to the cinema tonight. There's some more tips that you can follow to improve your English or British English pronunciation, but maybe it works across all dialects to one tip would be when you lengthen a word and you raise your tone, like you go higher, it indicates uncertainty. So I could say, well personally I disagree and you can also kind of tell the, I'm expecting some, some you know someone to argue with me. I'm expecting people not to agree. I'm a bit hesitant, reluctant to say it. I disagree. Well, here's another example. You can use it as a question, but it's when you're not sure if the person will agree or not. I don't know. Do you agree? If I went very, very high because I'm really not sure if the other person will agree or not. So going high indicates uncertainty. Is it many of these tips I found on pronunciation studio.com I will link that in the show notes on my website. So if you want to kind of see more information about what I'm talking about, it's a really good page to have a look at there. I've never heard of this website before but it looks very good. So I will link that to you. Another tip is if you start high and fall, so you go like down a slide in your sentence, it makes you sound interested. So I could say it's so good to see you started very high and went down. So the higher you start, the more interested and excited that you sound. Another little tip is when the word ends with a fall and then a rise kind of like you're going down than up indicates that you're going to say, but something else is not. You're not saying everything that you're thinking basically. So one example would be he's good at singing. So if you listen, I said singing is kind of like a down than an up a full and rise. So even if I don't say, but you know that I'm going to say, well I'm thinking, but maybe he shouldn't do it as a career. Michael is good at podcasting and in brackets, but maybe he should give up. Maybe he's really bad actually. So that's one more tip. Maybe the last tip we can look at today, and notice I said last very high because I'm uncertain whether this is really the last tip is a falling tone in a tag question, a question tag. So this is where we sound like isn't it? Or haven't you at the end of a sentence? So I could say it's hot today isn't it? Isn't it kind of falls, it goes down. It's hot today, isn't it? And this is quite unusual because even though it's a question, we don't raise the tone. So when we have a question tag like your British aren't you? And it goes down, that means I know you agree. And I don't really expect the reply. If I say, yeah, it's hot today, isn't it? I know you're going to agree. I'm not asking you for your reply, but you can reply if you want to. If we do the same sentence, but we rise to the tone, the tone goes up. Then that indicates where as, as I said before, uncertain and we kind of.. We want your opinion. We're expecting you to answer. So it's hot today, isn't it? That means, you know, I'm not sure what you're going to say. I really want to know you're cold, aren't you? Or if I say your cold, aren't you? I mean, of course you're cold, you've got ice on your body, you're freezing. But okay, so to summarise today, really don't worry. That's what I always say is don't worry. Um, there's a lot of rules you could learn related to accent. As I said in the first episode, the best thing that you can do is just actively listen to how people speak and your accent will develop over time. I really think there's no point in trying to get a perfect accent. If you have trouble speaking English generally I think accent will develop naturally while you're learning English. So don't worry too much. Enjoy the ride, enjoy the learning experience and don't stress out over that. No pun intended. Maybe one final tip as well is don't be afraid to vary your intonation. As I said before, I think compared to many languages, British English or maybe English in general does go up and down quite a lot. So we start really high and then go down and the opposite and it kind of shows your emotion and I don't think I'm so good at doing this. Generally I always feel like I'm a bit more monotone than most people, a bit more flat. But I think if you want to be more easily understood, experiment, have some fun with what you're saying and go up and down. Be more expressive and emotive. So that's my final tip today. I think in the future I might find an American teacher to talk to and then we can kind of do a podcast comparing the differences. That might be fun to do. So maybe I will think about doing that in the future. Yeah. If you know any American teachers who you would like to see me talk to, of course, let me know, send me a message or a comment and I will look into talking with them. But yeah, so for now, thank you very much for listening to this episode. Uh, if you have a question you're welcome to ask me, you can go to ewmicheal. com/podcast at the bottom of the page, there will be an option to send a voice message or a written message so you can ask me your questions and I can answer them in a future podcast. Thank you very much for listening and I will see you next week. Bye bye.

Speaker 1: 19:13

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