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English learners, if you found that hard to understand, keep watching!
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening! Welcome to Smashing English! Before we start
this video be sure to subscribe because we 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! Today we are once again delving into the
wonderful world of UK accents because I get it, you spend so long learning English and you think
you're pretty good and then you visit the UK or you watch a TV series based in the UK and you
can't understand anything! So let me make this a little bit easier for you because if you're
learning a language it's really important to be able to understand it spoken in different ways,
not everybody in the UK sounds like me, we have so many different accents and they are beautiful,
it's amazing that in such a small country we can have such a variety of accents. So let's
talk about how to understand difficult UK accents. First of all we're going to play a little game,
I love games, they're great, who doesn't love a game? I'm going to play you three different clips,
see if you can identify the UK accent because being able to identify the accent is a great place
to start if you want to understand the accent, if you're not very good with UK accents don't
worry this is just a bit of fun, so let's listen to the first clip, where is this person from?
This person is from Liverpool, they have a wonderful Liverpool
accent or Scouse accent as a lot of people call it. Okay, next clip! ...
They were from North Wales, North Wales. So there is a bit of a difference between
a South Wales accent and a North Wales accent so the one you just
heard was a North Wales accent. And finally, where is this person from?
This person was from Cornwall, oh a beautiful place, Cornwall, if you ever visit the UK go
to Cornwall it's beautiful. So as you can see from just those three examples we have a lot of
variation in our dialects across the UK so how on Earth are we supposed to understand all of
them? Well here comes my first tip, now this might seem obvious but you've got to listen and immerse
yourself in these dialects it sounds so basic but it's basic because it works you've just got
to listen as much as you can but make it fun for yourself so try to explore some different films,
some different TV series, some different podcasts where the range of dialects are different,
if you only ever watch Downton Abbey and The Crown you won't get very good at understanding many
different dialects and accents so do some research and find some really good media, media that's
entertaining, that you want to watch, that shows you a range of different accents. Tip number two,
pay attention to pronunciation patterns, so let me give you some features of UK accents that a
lot of English Learners find really difficult to understand. Now an accent can either be rhotic
or non-rhotic, so very quickly, a rhotic accent pronounces all of the R's, so think of the USA
think of the California accent they would say my car is so powerful, car, powerful, they pronounce
all the R's. A non-rotic accent is an accent where you only pronounce an R if it comes before
a vowel, so my accent is non-rhotic, I wouldn't say my car is powerful, I would say my car is
powerful because those R's don't come before vowels, however if I wanted to say something
like the road is brown, I say those R's so I say road because there's a vowel after it and I say
brown because there's a vowel after the R. Now not all UK accents are non-rhotic, we heard Cornwall
before, that's quite a rhotic accent, they say their R's, Northern Irish is a rhotic accent,
they say their R's as well, but a lot of the time if you listen to someone who's from Surrey for
example they will have a non-rhotic accent and that can be quite confusing for English
Learners because a lot of accents around the world are rhotic, so they're very used to
hearing R's especially if you listen to a lot of American content, if you watch American TV shows,
American movies, they say all of their R's, so when an English learner listens to a UK accent
that is non-rhotic this can be quite confusing, so you've got to be aware that in a lot of UK accents
we're not saying that R, it's just not going to happen. Another pronunciation feature you
will hear in a lot of UK accents is the dropped t or the glottal stop so I'm sure you've heard
the stereotype that when someone wants to do a British accent they say 'a bo-uh of wa-uh' are
instead of a bottle of water and this comes from some truth, if you listen to someone like Adele
you will notice that she drops a lot of T's so instead of saying better she would say be-er.
And this is because she's from London and there are lots of accents in London, don't even get
me started, but a lot of them drop their T's, even in Liverpool they might drop their T's,
as well so instead of saying what they'll say wha-, so it's completely changed the word,
it's no longer what it's wha-. There's, there's no t, so if you really want to
understand some of these accents you have to change your thinking and you
have to stop expecting to hear T's and instead expect to hear glottal stops,
so a glottal stop is when you stop the air in your throat so instead of saying better you say...
it's like, it just like clicks out of your throat in a really weird way, or instead of water it's
wa-er, so there's still some kind of stop there, we're not just going war, war, we are saying water
but it's just different to water. Now this doesn't mean that everybody in the UK drops their teas,
a lot of accents keep their T', it's beautiful but you just might hear a lot of dropped T's and
glottal stops. Another pronunciation feature that English learners find really hard to understand,
is the intrusive R, so we're talking about linking here, we're talking about linking words together
which happens in most languages but obviously if you're not familiar with the linking it's going to
be really confusing so what a lot of dialects in the UK do is we take a sentence like this
'Law and Order' now in between 'law' and 'and', there's no R is there? Do you see an R there? No
but this is where English spelling is really annoying because the word law is spelled law,
it's spelled with an aw, but we don't say that, we say law and it almost sounds like door,
like law and door rhyme, so think about the door spelling, that ends in an R,
this is kind of an R ending word, so to link 'law' and 'and', we don't look at the W, we don't go
lawand order because that sounds ridiculous, we go lawRand order, lawRand order, lawRand order
so weirdly it sounds like my name, Laura, even though it doesn't look like that at all, law uh,
Laura, law and order. This is called an intrusive R because we are creating an R even though an R
is not written, we're just putting an R in there so this can be extremely confusing when you're
listening to someone do this because suddenly you've heard this R sound and you're thinking
'oh whoa whoa okay so it's a word that ends in R' but not necessarily because law does not end in R,
same with words that end in a schwa sound, a schwa is a completely neutral sound it goes like this...
let's do the schwa dance...
So there's no effort, I'm not moving my mouth,
I'm just going uh, so if a word ends in that like this one: idea, idea,
we'll do the intrusive R to link it to a vowel, so we'll say this idea is great, this idea is great,
I know it's very confusing. Or the people in that area are really nice, area are. And it
will take some time, it will feel very alien to you to begin with, it will feel like the weirdest
thing ever if you've never done it, but if you want to understand it you've got to at least try
to do it a couple times so you are familiar with what's actually happening. Okay tip number three
another reason why you are probably finding it really difficult to understand some UK regional
dialects is because of slang and because of idioms. And slang changes all throughout the UK,
if you get in the car and you travel an hour this way you will meet new slang it just completely
changes everywhere, so the best thing to do here is choose the accent that you want to focus on,
maybe you are moving to Dorset and you think 'okay I need to know the Dorset slang' just completely
throw yourself into it, try to listen to a podcast of someone from Dorset, go, you know, the internet
is amazing, type in slang words from Dorset. You've got to understand the slang because a lot
of the time you might listen to someone speaking and they're speaking very clearly but they're
using so many slang words from their region that it makes it sound like a whole different language,
like if you think about the example I gave at the beginning the black country voice said this: ...
Now what on Earth is a cuppa char? If you are not from the Black Country,
you don't know what a cuppa char is, I'm from the black country and a cup of char is a cup
of tea but if you didn't know that, you would hear that and it would sound completely crazy,
so slang is vital to understand and you can't learn the slang from everywhere so be specific,
yeah find an accent that you're the most interested in and learn their slang because it
changes no matter where you go. Okay tip number four, don't be afraid to ask for clarification,
now this only works if you're actually talking to someone, it doesn't really work if you're watching
TV or a film but if you're talking to someone and they say something that you don't understand,
ask them just, just ask them, say 'oh I'm really sorry, I'm not from here could you just,
what was that you just said?' There's no shame in that at all, we need to remove the shame of not
being perfect in an accent because a whole lot of us in the UK do not speak another language,
not everyone, lots of people can speak more than one language, but a lot of us, because English
is our native language, we don't learn another language, so the fact that you're trying and
you can speak English is great, so don't have any shame about it feel free to ask for clarification.
Okay final tip, like I said earlier the best way to understand an accent is to be able to do the
accent even a little bit, now I'm not expecting you to do the most amazing accent ever just try
to replicate it because if you are trying to make those sounds in your mouth it will be much easier
to identify them when you hear it because you remember when you had to make it yourself so my
biggest advice to you is try to do these dialects if you're really struggling to understand one,
attack that accent learn how to do it, understand every single vowel sound, every single consonant
sound, how do they link words together? What slang do they use? If you can do it you will be able to
understand it, if you have no idea how that accent is made or the sounds that they are making you
won't understand it, that is my challenge to you. Thank you so much for watching this video! If you
enjoyed it, please give it a like, if you would like to follow us on Instagram you can do so there
and if you would like an online one-to-one English lesson with me or my partner Bez,
the link for that is down below, thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time, tata!