My accent

To go on with the story about accents, I add a video to demonstrate a Russian accent.

For me it was of particular interest as my first language is Russian.

Accents:
How To Do A Russian Accent

British vs American

It has been a lot of discussion about British and American English.

Some teachers in my university had the opinion which can be called puristic.

Sally Johnson and Natalie Braber in their book "Exploring the German language" give the perfect description of the phenomenon:

"Linguistic purism can take different forms. Generally, however, it is

concerned with the opposition to changes taking place in a language or the desire
to change something which is already present in the language. This can also
include the preservation of elements which are seen as desirable and very often
involves the ideas of prescriptivism (the laying down of language rules and how
language ‘should’ be spoken or written) and judges the influence of foreign
language elements. Purism and prescriptivism have in common the belief that
linguistic judgements can be made, and that we can contrast ‘good’ versus ‘bad’
usage of language. Both schools of thought generally follow a model of tradition,
i.e. older forms of language are ‘better’ than present-day language and that
changes taking place within the current period are often viewed negatively."

Thus, we were to learn British English, which was under the circumstances a difficult task. We did read authentic books where we could pick up gmammar structures and sentence flow, we could also watch videos, however our communication to the British native speakers was limited.

My ancounters with Americans were, on the contrary, numerous, starting from childhood when several Peace Corps projects were run at my school. This made American English intonations much more familiar to me.

To tell the truth, many British accents, as well as many American ones are stunning.

Go to you tube and you'll understand that I am not the only one who loves parroting accents.

Here are some great tips from Amy Walker:

I can't help showing you the famous "21 accents" by Amy Walker, which I learned about from one of my favourite university teachers:

Two more videos on British and American accent:

Accents:
How To Do A British Accent

Accents:
How To Do An American Accent

So, in your opinion, what makes your accent?

How to learn new words

Yes, you can fall in love ...with words!

One expression I've recently fell for is pockets of the city, which refers to backstreets. Met at New York Daily Photos blog.

It is very often that I discover just awesome words.

And you? Can you share words that impressed you?