I used to have loads of problems trying to differentiate the different English accents (still do anyway)… Scottish or Welsh? I couldn’t even make the difference between a cockney Londoner & any American (it’s not my native language so…), now luckily enough I do.
Today reading The Guardian we’ve found one of those websites that you won’t spend more than 5 – 10 min in. However it could be extremely useful not only for foreign speakers helping them differentiating English accents but also for natives as basically you have 1300 ways of pronouncing the following pharagraph…
“Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.”
Russians, Chinese, Peruvians…, all sorts of regions & areas from basically every country in the world and ages get to pronounce this typical academic sentence. Wanna laugh a bit at how your country representatives pronounce it?
Some accents are soooooooo strong (although we suspect that they’ve mostly chosen foreigners with very good English levels).
[tweetmeme]
