Good morning, good afternoon and good evening! Welcome to Smashing English,
before we start this video, be sure to subscribe because I make new videos all
the time and I don't want you to miss any, so with that said, let's get on with the video!
Okay today's video is a little bit different, today I'm going to be responding to some comments
I have had on previous videos. A lot of people on this channel are very interested in accents and
accents of the UK, and great, I'm very interested in accents of the UK too! So, of course there's a
lot of interest in my accent, so in this video I just want to answer any questions you have about
what accent I have or where I'm from or anything like that because I know if you want to learn a
particular accent you want to be confident in who you're listening to and what accent they have to
see if you want to copy it or not, makes sense! So let's start off with the first question I get,
what is my accent? Now I've had a few comments in the past because I have referred to my accent
in a couple of different ways, so I have a mixed accent, that's why it's quite tricky
for me to pinpoint it down and that's why it's quite tricky for listeners to put my
voice in a box. So I grew up in the Black Country and people from the Black Country talk like this,
alright? So if I was from the Black Country, proper, proper, I'd talk like this, but clearly
I don't talk like that. Why don't I talk like that? Because my family, my entire family are
from Surrey, they are from London, so my Mother and my Dad, they talk with standard english, RP,
sort of somewhere in the middle of those two, so that was my influence growing up, I had
people in the house talking like they were from Surrey, so there was not a lot of Black Country
accents in my house but then when I went to school i was surrounded by Black Country accents and I
was surrounded by Birmingham accents, you know? Like different accents from the West Midlands,
so therefore my accent shifted a little bit. Then I went to Liverpool for university, I don't think
my accent changed that much being in Liverpool, I didn't pick up a Scouse accent so I don't think
Liverpool is too important, I think I had my accent pretty much cemented in me by the time
i went to Liverpool. So I would say my accent is a mixture of standard English and West Midlands,
that's about as clear as I can give you, now the reason I say that is because I drop a lot of my
Ts, you can hear it there, drop a lot of, drop a lot of my Ts, that's just how I say things, I also
say grass instead of grass and my Mum and my Dad say grass, they say laugh, I don't, I say laugh.
Sometimes depending on who I'm talking to, I can slip back into Black Country, so if i'm talking
to someone who's from where I'm from, I might slip into a bit more of a Black Country twang,
like the way I say country, I don't say country, I say country, so there's lots of different elements
in there that um are not RP. However when I teach online and when I make these videos,
I make an effort to not drop so many Ts and I make an effort to be a bit clearer and not sound like
I'm from the Black Country because I think that will be quite hard to understand for people who
are not from Britain. So when you listen to me, pretty much it's standard English, pretty much.
Obviously there's going to be little words here and there that aren't perfect standard English but
it's pretty much standard English. Okay that's the first question, the second question relates
to this video I posted so I posted a video about the RP accent and common mistakes I hear when I
am teaching people the RP accent and I had a lot of um comments saying, you don't sound like you're
RP, you said this word instead of this word and you said this word instead of this word,
um, but I'm not RP, I never claimed to have an RP accent. In the video for like a brief sentence
I think I say something like RP is how i'm talking right now so RP is like this,
for that sentence I was doing an RP accent but for the rest of the video I was just talking like me,
so um, my point is that I can teach an RP accent even though I don't have one,
I know how to do an RP accent and I know the features of one, so a lot of my students online
they want to speak in an RP accent, so therefore I teach them one. Coming on to my next point,
RP is not the only accent you can learn, so by me making that video I'm, no way am I saying
that you have to speak in an RP accent if you want to learn English, no way, no way at all,
whatever accent you have, whether it's a, you know, you've got a Spanish accent or, you know,
Italian or Korean, whatever you have, that's amazing, as long as you're pronouncing things,
you know, understandably and correctly in terms of what the word is and as long as people can
understand you, great! Absolutely brilliant! But the reason why I made a video about RP rather than
anything else is because a lot of my students want to learn an RP accent, so fair enough, if a lot of
people want to learn it, let's make a video about it. So that's my point, you don't have to learn
an RP accent, you could learn a Birmingham accent if you want, you could learn a Newcastle accent,
a Northern Irish accent, or whatever, Australian accent, whatever you want! It's completely up
to you. Another thing about my accent that I see sometimes in the comments is the fact that I speak
quite informally, so I might say things like wanna and gonna in my lesson, so when I'm teaching you,
I might say like, you know, if you go to England, you're gonna hear this a lot or I might say,
um, if you wanna learn an RP accent blah blah blah, this is normal for a lot of native English
speakers, whether they're American, Australian, British, everyone says it. Well, not everyone,
maybe the Queen doesn't, but a lot of people say wanna and gonna. So when I started this channel,
I made an effort to not remove them because imagine if I always talk to you
perfectly like this and I pronounce every single word as is written, so I say want to
and going to then that's lovely and I'm sure you will understand me but then if you go to Britain
or if you go to America or if you go to Australia and you hear people saying -
You're going to be like, what? Excuse me? What I said there was: What do you wanna do after this,
I'm gonna go to the shop. So you need to have practice hearing those things because
so many people talk like that like everywhere, so I think it's important to have listening practice
with real English, how real people use this language, otherwise what's the point? Because
you'll talk to someone, you know, you'll talk to a native speaker and they'll be speaking English to
you and you won't understand what they're saying. So I think personally, I think it's important to
hear English in lots of different ways. There are lots of channels on Youtube for learning English,
there are some people with perfect RP accents if you really want to listen to that, then there are
so many channels with perfect RP accents. There are channels from American teachers,
from Australian teachers, there are loads, um, but me personally, I just talk how I talk,
I'm not putting an accent on, I'm not pretending to have any particular accent, this is how I talk
and I think it's quite useful for English learners to practice listening to lots of different people
with lots of different accents and ways of speaking. So I hope that answers some questions,
those were the main things in the comments that I saw, but the main point is especially in the UK,
like, accents are so varied and so many people have mixed accents, it's really hard to to
pinpoint people and say well you have a strictly this accent. A lot of people do have a very clear
accent from one place but a lot of people have a mix and a lot of people are influenced by media,
like, there are some people in the UK that have some Americanisms in their voice because of all
the American media that we that we see, but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter,
as long as when you are speaking English. people can understand you,
great! That that's all you need to worry about! But I know a lot of learners want
to strive towards a particular accent because they want to sound like a native and they want
to be understood by a lot of people, brilliant! So I will continue to be here to help you
on your language journey and your accent journey. If you have any other questions, leave them down
in the comments below. If you'd like to follow us on Instagram you can do so there- if you want
an online one-to-one English lesson with me or my partner, Bez, you can find that down below as well
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down in the description below. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time, tata!