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Looking for BRITISH English conversation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| menez93 Pro Member Italy Joined 4452 days ago 10 posts - 10 votes Speaks: Italian* Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 8 01 November 2015 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I see around in the internet that there are a lot of websites with audio conversation
and dialogues but all of them with an american accent. I live in UK so I prefer to focus on british accent because, as well as, improve my listening I want to pick up a good accent and get rid of my Italian accent (which sounds quite silly). So...do you know if such resources, websites and so on exist in a british accent? I haven't found anything yet... Something like Englishclass101, where you have a different level of difficulty or something like Assimil, which I love..So...sort of dialogues like these two along with transcript. My level, concerning the listening skill, I would say is C1-C2. Just today I attempted a listening test for the CPE and I did actually really well. So if the resource is challenging as well it would be great. I'm trying with films but it's still quite difficult to watch them without subtitles. And please don't suggest me to read novels in English because I tried and I find them not very useful if you want to improve your vocabulary while listening. The words, most of the time are used in writing, a different style, in which I'm not really interested right now. I hope someone can help me. It would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4670 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 2 of 8 01 November 2015 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Any British sitcom will do, or popular shows like Geordie shore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UHsMF634Bo Edited by Medulin on 01 November 2015 at 6:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4667 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 3 of 8 02 November 2015 at 1:56am | IP Logged | |||||
At C1 and above I would have thought that most TV programmes would be quite comprehensible. You won't get a transcript, of course, but you will get plenty of authentic British accents. The BBC news and local news should provide a wealth of useful listening material. There are plenty of US- sourced programmes, but there are plenty of home-grown ones too. The BBC has iplayer and many of the other channels have an equivalent, so you can find something you like and watch it again an again, skipping back over sections you didn't quite catch the first time around. That should provide plenty of material for input. As for output, you can record and listen to yourself (although when I tried that I found it a bit tedious) or you can ask friends for input ... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4667 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 4 of 8 02 November 2015 at 2:03am | IP Logged | |||||
Unless you really want a very specific accent I would suggest that you steer clear of something like that. By all means use it to improve your listening comprehension but imitating that sort of accent isn't likely to be helpful, especially since, until and unless you get it right, you'll sound like you are taking the mickey, or just weird. The aim (IMHO) should be to eliminate from your speech any influences from your native language, in order make your conversations easier to understand. Throwing in a reasonably heavy regional accent isn't the best way to do that (again IMHO). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4670 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 5 of 8 06 November 2015 at 11:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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I beg to differ.
Solfrid Christina speaks Spanish with a heavy regional accent (Andalusian) and I speak Portuguese with a heavy reagional accent too (Baiano). Native regional accents are much more convincing than non-native foreign accents. The key is: go to a certain region, spend some time there and acquire the local accent, this especially true for Italian, since all Italians speak with a local accent and no Italian speaks with the standard Italian - the accent RAI dubbing/voice actors use. Edited by Medulin on 06 November 2015 at 11:42am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4667 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 6 of 8 07 November 2015 at 8:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well if you live in Geordieland, then you'll (probably) pick up (at least some) of the local accent naturally. Regional accents (that aren't from your local region, obviously) are generally harder for outsiders to understand than the accents they are more familiar with. In the UK that would be the local accent and the modern-BBC accent (not the plum-in-the-mouth accents you get in broadcasts from the 1950s). Those are the ones everyone hears and is familiar with. The stronger the accent, the harder it is (generally) to understand when it is not your local one. Another thing to bear in mind is that a regional will often evoke an almost automatic response in the mind of the listener, and that response will not always be positive. I'm from the West Midlands and I can tell you that that accent isn't necessarily the most helpful one when you are in a job interview. Finally, if your foreign accent is getting in the way of comprehension, then that's clearly something to work on. We have at least a dozen non-native English speakers in the office who have a clearly non-native accent (Italian, Polish, various part of India etc.). All of them are perfectly understandable and all of them make various noticeable (but not-intrusive grammatical errors). If they were to ask, then I'd suggest sorting out those errors before worrying about eliminating an existing accent or acquiring a new one. Here's a Romanian speaking easy-to-understand, pretty good English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iI4RF8kQ7Y . 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| haziz Bilingual Triglot Newbie United States Joined 3864 days ago 28 posts - 37 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian)*, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 8 22 November 2015 at 10:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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How about listening to the BBC World Service News? While it is targeted mainly at foreign shores, I believe you can stream it from within the UK. While it is no longer exclusively the "Queens English" that you will hear from the announcers, and there are now some announcers with mild regional accents, it is mostly "proper" English that you will hear from the announcers and correspondents. Moreover, the overall quality of the programming on the World Service remains quite superb, not just the news.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luhmann Senior Member Brazil Joined 5335 days ago 156 posts - 271 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: Mandarin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic (classical) | Message 8 of 8 27 November 2015 at 1:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2ysVimz2tw&list=PL0713159CB 6F2AFE5 Edited by luhmann on 27 November 2015 at 1:48am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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