Hello everyone. You know a question we the students of English translation ask or are been asked most of the time is: Which is the hardest accent to understand? The British accent ( bad called 'British' then we'll see why) or the American English.
To begin with, it is almost impossible to get to know an English teacher living in Argentina or someone who has spent a long time in the U.K as if to teach it perfectly. It is a very hard accent to imitate, it has got many different sounds and what most of us believe: It sometimes makes you sound a bit womanish (I am not saying that English people are gay!) It is just that we don't have a voice to reproduce it exactly as they do. The same happen to them when they try to imitate the Spanish or the Argentine accent, it is clearly impossible.
In addition to that, we don't have quite a few British movies on t.v which makes it even harder to get ourselves used to this accent. As I did comment in the last post, we have the chance to listen to the BBC radio. That might be one of the easiest ways to embody a 'British' accent.
Now, why a 'British' accent? I take it you refer to the accent used in England. We are so used to call it 'British' that we forget that there are three more countries inside the U.K in which the accent differs rather a lot from the one used in England. Those countries are Wales (they are more likely to speak English in the south and Welsh in the north), Scotland (they have an awfully strange and rough way to pronounce the letter R and the I with the N together like in "bahiiiinnndd"'behind' and some of them use a language slang called 'Doric' which is a complete deformation of the actual English.) And finally, North Ireland (I don't know too much about them) But the thing is, they don't share the same accent. It even changes inside England. The London accent, the Mancunian accent, the Scousers accent or something like that ( Liverpool) It is amazing the big quantity of accents you can find there, so next time try to avoid using 'British' to refer to a general accent.
Coming back to what concerns us, the American accent. Why is it, in a way, 'easier' to understand than the English accent? As I said before, we are full of American movies, we don't have many English movies so that does make the difference. What's more, everybody has forgotten the strong London accent with which teachers used to teach a couple of years ago. Now, almost all of them speak American. As an example, from a personal experience: My first 3 years of English were at the American FISK Institute. So since I was a child I saw myself forced to get used to that accent. Anyways, I try not to speak with an American accent, in fact I do not have an American accent, it is not that I hate it, no, it is just that I don't like my voice in it, and I much prefer anything that has to do with the British culture indeed.
Basically, in my opinion the harder is the English, Scottish, Welsh or the Northern Irish accent. Despite the fact I do love them, they are rather hard to understand anyway.
