I'm Dillon and I'm an accent reduction coach. My students' goal is to sound more American specifically and I help them with that! I'll be posting tips on this channel to help you with your pronunciation if you're looking to sound like a native speaker. This is also helpful if your goal is to speak more clearly. These two goals align with each other!
Check out www.dialectwork.com if you're interested in working with me. All sessions are held on Zoom. I have students from all across the world!
Yo this is not working - instead try out reading the comment and explaining how someone else could join too - basically a call to action at the end - you could start with a hook here's what NASIF had to say after attending x for y days. Something like that.
Most people believe/are told that it's not possible. I definitely had a lot of people around me growing up that thought you had to be resigned to your accent in English but like you said, people have done it! It's 100% possible.
That's exactly one of the reasons people tend to have trouble knowing what sounds to go for. Patterns like this are common and very helpful, although there are also lots of cases that don't follow any particular rules and we simply have to memorize how to say those words.
If you have trouble getting the tongue twister the way you want, I recommend slowing down and even working on just parts of the tongue twister on their own as well. Trying to say anything, especially tongue twisters quickly, increases the difficulty level significantly. Hope that helps!
I'm not a native English speaker, and for the life of me, I CANNOT hear the difference between a W and a V, unless it is explicitly pointed out like in the video here. Something else I noticed in the video; do British English spell/speak out the letter W (dub-li-yu) different to American English (dub-oui-yu), or is it just that I'm mishearing?
Hi there, Yes, that's quite a common issue. In a lot of languages 'w' and 'v' letter are also pronounced the same so that will add to that. I recommend that if you encounter an instance where you feel like you can't tell the difference, repeat the word to yourself a couple times and switch out the /v/ for a /w/ (or the other way around) using the instructions for positioning in this video. Doing this, over time, will make it easier for your ears to pick up on the difference in a live conversation or when watching videos. In regards to the 'w' letter being spelled out, British and American speakers spell the letter out the same actually. This would be an approximation (using English words) of how they both say it "double-you". The actual phonetic writing would be /dʌblju/. The thing that happens here as well is that most non-native speakers spell the letter out quite quickly so it can be difficult sometimes to hear every phonetic sound in it + some native speakers are a bit mumbly as well. The mumbling could account for not hearing the L as clearly in the American version but that can happen to Brits as well. Hope that helps and thank you for leaving a comment!
Hi there, Sure, I can make a video series on some of the key differences. Generally, most "North American" accents, whether they are dialects within American or within Canadian are very close to each other. If we take a "general" Canadian accent and a "general" American accent, they have a lot in common. There are some vowels that Americans will typically notice as different, for example the double vowel in the word "abOUt" is one that comes up quite commonly as well as the vowel used in words like "bat" or "cat". That being said, just like there's a lot of variety within American dialects, the same is the case for Canadian dialects as well. So even though certain things can be commonly "associated" with the Canadian accent, they might not necessarily occur in that same way in your own speech. It depends on where in Canada you're from, what kind of environment you grew up in socially, etc. I wouldn't call myself an expert on Canadian accents either so I won't claim that I have the best answers to that particular question. Still, I can make a video on some of the general differences in the future. I hope this helps!
I studied IPA in grad school at USC which is part of what Dillon uses in his work. I find his explanations more clear, concise, and practical than much of what I learned in school. He is a caring, thoughtful, and thorough teacher. I highly recommend.
What you wrote here is a valid drill but would only cover one stop-plosive (/t/). The drill I describe in the video covers more ground in regards to warming up quickly with all stop-plosives but if you want to hone in on /t/ then your suggestion would work as well.
