Dave Menashe

What's the difference between an accent and a dialect? Can anyone learn to do them? If you've long admired those who can, learn their secrets, and get started on your own quest to sound like an exotic person from a different region or country than your own.

In October 2010, Look for Accents & Dialects Part 2 -- Expand Your Range

Transcript

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Hi, Dave Meashe here and this time I'm going to talk to you a little about accents and dialects and how to use them. I was talking yesterday to David Rosenthal and he said "can anyone learn any accent or dialect?"

And the answer is "not quite", but pretty much "yes".

So first of all, a little distinction. What's the difference between an accent and a dialect? It's pretty simple, really. People who speak english as their native tongue have an english dialect. For example someone from London, "you know what I'm talkin' about? They 'ave a cockney dialect, don't they". Now someone from France who doesn't speak English as a native tongue, would have a French accent. So when they're speaking English, they're speaking with a French accent.

So accent vs. dialect. Now they're used interchangeably, but that's just to differentiate. Now let's talk a little bit about how you learn an accent or a dialect and the truth is, all you're really doing is mimicking. There are tons of resources on the internet that can help you with this. Some people find it very easy and usually the people who find it easy to pick up accents are the people who can already do an accent. It's a little bit like music - if you play the piano, you can probably pick up the guitar fairly easily and vice versa. But if you don't know how to read music, you don't know what the scales are, the chords. If you don't know any of that, then learning your first instrument is going to be a little more tricky.

So once you've got past the first 1 or 2, you can build on those and you've got the foundation there to learn a lot more very easily.

In the next lesson, we're going to talk about some of the internet resources that can help you and we're going to give you some very specific techniques on how to mimic and how to learn accents and dialects.

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