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British vs American English
- What’s your personal experience with British English and American English?
Personally, I much prefer British English rather than American one. I think the former is sweeter, more delicate and somehow more sophisticated than American English, which I consider a little more aggressive and sometimes coarse…
Also, maybe because of my personal experience, I feel British English more familiar, though this doesn’t mean that I find it easy, not at all! The number of idioms, phrasal verbs and accents (as we saw in the EDA course n.3!) are countless and I think that a whole life would not be enough for me to learn 10% of them!
- Have you always studied one or the other? Have you spoken to both Brits and Americans? What’s your experience?
<div>At school I have always studied French! Except for a few private lessons taken by an Italian lady (her English was actually quite good!), I learned the little English I know from the field! And, to be more precise, from the girls I lived with in Scotland during my Erasmus program! What a pity that my funny and nice flatmates were Indian and Pakistani! So, whenever it happened to me to speak English, English people asked me smiling “Why do you speak with an Asian accent ???”. You know! </div><div>After that 6 month experience, I had the great opportunity to live in Milan with a girl from Aberdeen (again a bond with Scotland!) who had a nice clean English accent that somehow and luckly contaminated my Asian accent ! And this is my experience with the Brits! </div>
As for the Americans, I had tons of calls with colleagues from US when I worked for a multinational company. Live, I just met some real Americans during my 4 fantastic short trips to New York. There, I’m sure I made scads of Rookie mistakes because of the vocabulary (subway and underground is the first example that comes to my mind) but I can’t say how many and which because, unlike Kerin, I didn’t have the key to work out the puzzled glare of my interlocutors!
- Can you distinguish between a British accent and an American one?
Maybe this EDA course will refute my certainty (we’ll see!), but I believe to be able to distinguish between a British accent and an American one. This belief also stems from the infinite number of TV series I’ve been seeing since years ago on! Many of them are obviously American, but I did loved series like Downtown Abbey, the Crown and one of the most recent, Fleabag, fantastic!
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1 Reply
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Morning Sonia! Thank you for your thoughts about this topic, it’s interesting to learn about everyone’s experiences and I enjoy your storytelling and use of vocabulary – nice!
Actually some of the words and expressions you are using are TOP! (scads of Rookie mistakes, coarse, stems from, refute … TOP TOP TOP!)
Some notes:
> Except for a few private lessons taken by an Italian lady … this sounds like the Italian lady did the lessons as the student. So you took the lessons, she gave them:
Except for a few private lessons from an Italian lady OR Except for a few private lessons taught by an Italian lady
I want to give you some pointers to make things sound even more natural:
> I feel British English more familiar, – British English feels more familiar to me
> I think that a whole life would not be enough – I think that a whole lifetime would not be enough
Please correct:
At school I have always studied French!
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