hi students hope you're well in this
video i'm going to
teach you how to get a british accent
by teaching you some quick accent
tricks you can apply to sound more
british
step one of the lesson is going to be to
remove some common americanisms
so these are influences on your accent
that you've picked up from
watching american tv or from an american
teacher so we're going to remove those
so you sound more british
and then in step two we're going to
refine your british accent
a little bit more and there'll be some
tricks i'm going to throw in that are
uniquely british which if you
start speaking that way you're going to
sound a lot more british and just
quickly
why do you want to sound more british
and
improve your accent well usually that's
because
you live in the uk or
you just love the sound of british
english
and you're interested in improving your
pronunciation
and if you are living in the uk another
reason for
changing your accent in this way is so
that people
understand you more easily okay let's
begin with
the first accent effect for sounding
more british
is we're talking about word stress here
because
in american english the stress on words
tends to be in the second syllable
whereas in british english it's the
opposite
so let's go through each word so you can
hear the difference
in british english we say detail
stress here going down
but it's the other way around in
american english
detail debut
debut massage
massage cafe
cafe now let's move to our second
british accent effect which is that we
don't pronounce
the final r in words it's there in the
spelling
but it's just there to trick you
[Music]
so look at our example words which are
better
butter brother sometimes when americans
are doing
a joke impression of the british accent
they say
butter and they
to their ears it sounds like it's got a
r at the end in fact the sound that we
have here is a schwa
it's unstressed so it shouldn't be big
better
butter brother
moving on to the main
americanism i would say that's quite
common in my
in my students and also increasingly
common in
native british speakers but it isn't
considered
um it's not considered good
pronunciation it's something called
flapped t where it ends up having a
d kind of sound so we'll give you a few
examples
[Music]
in british english we would say kitty
litter
we've got our double t words
and the consonant we're pronouncing here
is just a single ter
kitty litter
in american english it's going to be
more like a d sound
not exactly a de kitty
litter the same with this example
british english little letter
but in american english little letter
and one more
[Music]
bitter lettuce bitter lettuce
bitter lettuce and the last
main americanism we want to change in
your speech
involves learning a vowel
sound and making a shift
[Music]
in american accents they will pronounce
this vowel
r so it will sound like heart gut
bottom carp but in british english
we use a different vowel
called off so we would say
hot got bottom
cop okay let's move on to step
two now which is we're going to do more
little effects to make you sound more
british
we're going to talk about yod words now
this is when we we add a yes sound to
words that they don't do
in american english here are
three good examples for you in british
english if you're posh
you say duty
duke stupid stupid
yeah do you hear that glide in there
yeah but
in american english we don't hear that
we hear instead
duty duke stupid
okay moving on we have another vowel
change
that you need to learn for your british
accent
and i've represented it by the words cup
and girl the vowels in question here
are ah and
a shift happens so whereas in british
english in these words we're going to
say
uh in american english they're going to
use a different vowel
[Music]
in my british accent i say
worry here worry if you think about it
doesn't have an
o sound there worry worry the vowel is
quite bright
worry curry hurry they all rhyme
but in american english it would be
worry
curry hurry moving on now
in your british accent
something you want to do is shift words
that have
most words that have ar spelling
to pronounce them with a vowel that we
call
long a which in ipa
is like this r r
[Music]
british english transport r
transport path
bath sample sample
we can shift this vowel and we can say
said transport path
bath sample like in the northern accent
of the uk or we can say like an american
transport path bath
sample but if we want that british
effect
we've got to say ah and have quite a low
tone to it
transport transport and
now we're moving into what i would call
the overall effect that you make when
you're speaking in your british accent
although it's not the standard
pronunciation you might want to include
a
smattering which means a few occasional
glottals this symbol here represents a
glottal stop
in phonetics this is when
we don't pronounce the te at the end of
a word
or sometimes in the middle and instead
we make a
sound like like it's stuck in our throat
so i'll give you an example and say
not a lot of bottles not a lot of
bottles
if you if you do a smattering of glottal
stops you don't do it every single time
you don't replace every t with the
glottal stop but just occasionally and
let's bring it
together with one comment i would like
to make about
the rhythm of your british english
accent
you know it rains a lot here
we're famous for that right so we have
to take umbrellas when we go outside
often
because you never know when it's going
to rain
think of the rhythm like
droplets of rain falling the pita patter
of the raindrops falling because that's
very important in your
british accent that the syllables should
be like
so there are my quick accent tips for
you
to do a british accent there are
maybe a hundred or so of these quick
little accent
tricks for you to learn that would make
a long video
so we're not going to go through them
now but if you would like to take this
further i do have a british accent
training course
where i will teach you all of these
important british accent
effects and importantly i will give you
lots and lots of practice
because what we've done now is a very
quick mental lesson but to be able to
apply this
and speak like this you have to do
repeat after me practice
and that's what's included in my course
so i'd love for you to check that out
and consider joining thank you for
watching this video
and please do come back for more lessons
like this
thank you for watching bye