How Would You Like to Sound?

Do prefer any specific English accent?

We're just going to upfront say it out loud...

[There Is No Better Accent, Only A Correct Pronunciation]

First, let's see. What are the recognizable accents we know? American, British, Australia, African, Russian? Generally speaking, people favor the first two but the latter three are actually fun to play with. In Taiwan, most of us are taught with American English but more or less by something we called a "Taiwanese accent" which the first confusion occurs. A mispronunciation is not an accent. Although more often than not, mispronunciation and accents are in the mix and seem difficult to separate, we are going to draw a clear line here with frequently appeared examples.

Did you get them right?

The main reasons for the confusion of the two are education and public error, which are core related. Our "first English teacher" is critical but due to the lack of recognition of professional skills in our culture, we often learned bad or wrong pronunciation from the beginning. It's not always their fault because these teachers/caretakers are usually not professional English teachers. Vice versa, English teachers are usually not equipped with a nursery licence.

Thus, most of us don't have the correct pronunciation and it becomes the norm. A collective mistake becomes a culture and the few people who know the correct way would become abnormal. Those who know are actually put under pressure by those who don't because they may be seen as "showing off" sometimes. Plus, with the influence of more than just word of mouth, news channels, radio hosts, commercials...etc. having pronounced words in an incorrect way is common. Well, the way we develop "the Taiwanese accent" applies to this as well.

As we said at the beginning, there's not an accent that is better than another. You sure can have one which you're particularly fond of. Take the standard British accent for example (there are many British accents), many people consider it to be a more elegant-sounding tone than the typical American accent. That's alright; tastes vary.

In the aspect of learning, accents could be fun. It allows us a better grasp of rhythm, which boosts confidence in speaking, and deepens the memory for those who forget easily. In the video shown above, we practiced with a video Andy found. 3 sentences were all we needed to have fun and learn. We hope you enjoyed watching it as well.

All and all, whatever accent you learn, don't learn from this second video.

#video