How to understand different English accents?
In the last two weeks I’ve gone from Ireland to Los Angeles to New York... and believe me, it’s not always easy for me to understand what people are saying, either. In the video I tell you what to do.
Then once you’re done, go to the URL below and study my free ‘Rocket Launch Method’ training.
https://doingenglish.com/freetraining
Best,
Julian Northbrook
P.s. I’m currently in NYC, and I LOVE it here.
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Written Version & Notes: https://doingenglish.com/blog/how-to-...
Transcript:
Ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls. Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from https://doingenglish.com coming to you today from NYC. It's, I want to say it's a lovely day. It's not amazing, to be perfectly honest. It's a bit cloudy, but you know what? It's pleasantly warm. Surprisingly, so. I thought it was going to be a lot colder.
I kind of talked about this a little bit yesterday. But a couple of people have asked me about listening and in particular about understanding different accents. Since I'm here in the US at the moment, I mean, it's a particularly apt question for me to talk about. So, I'm going to kind of reiterate what I talked about in ... No, actually it would have been two videos ago and I kind of expand upon that.
So, understanding English and English accents can be tricky because unlike a lot of languages .... Well, I mean, this is true of all languages. I mean, for example, Japanese has a lot of different accents, and the Tokyo accent is different to, say, the South of Japan. This is more extreme in English, of course, because not only do we have regional accents, I think there are something like 46 main accent types in the UK alone. And that's just accent types, within each one there are multiple accents kind of embedded within that category of accents. Not only do we have multiple regional accents, like any language, but we also have multiple varieties of English. Whether that be British English, American English, Irish English, Canadian English, Auzzie English, Kiwi English, or of course the other accents where English is spoken as an official second language. Places like India, the Philippines, for example.
What this means is, is you are always going to encounter different ways of speaking, different ways of pronouncing the language. And this is always going to be a challenge. What you need to understand is this is not just a problem for non-native speakers. I have the same problem.
So, when I was in LA there were a few times when I didn't catch what people said. Now I'm here in New York, it's still an American accent, but it's very, very different to LA. When I got a coffee this morning at breakfast in Joe and the Juice, I think it's called, a Copenhagen coffee shop. I had to ask the guy to repeat himself three times before I understood what he was saying. That's not because my English is bad, it's because I am not used to hearing the accent that people use here.
So, you've really just got to get used to it. Now, the fastest way to do this, of course, is exactly as I've talked about quite a few times in different videos. What I call the two track approach. This balance of focused intensive study of learning. As I've talked about before, this might be a simple case of just growing your knowledge of the English language of phrases, expressions, chunks, bits of English. Or it might be specific exercises that you do for developing listening skills really, really fast. Then not needs to be combined with as much exposure and usage of the language as you can possibly get. That it's the fastest way to improve any aspect of your English. Listening included, and of course, understanding a particular accent.
Now, the nitty-gritty, ins and outs details of that goes beyond the scope of this video. But if you head over to https://doingenglish.com/freetraining you can, and should, consume, study my rocket launch method training where I'm going to teach you all about the two track approach and how to actually implement it. And, of course, how to get my personal help to do that if you want. Right.
This is me, Julian Northbrook signing out from this video. I am heading over to see Carrie Bradshaw's apartment. It's about a 15 minutes walk from here. Whilst I do that, check out my free training and I'll speak to you soon. Bye-bye.
#DoingEnglish #JulianNorthbrook #learnEnglish