Accents

I've been told that the people of Australia are the only people in the world without an accent.  (I was told this by an Australian.)

I like the Liverpool accent.  It kinda has a musical cadence to it.

The Jamaican accent can be quite nice.

zappaholic wrote: I've been told that the people of Australia are the only people in the world without an accent.  (I was told this by an Australian.)

Any American will tell you otherwise. 

What do Americans who speak Spanish sound like to you?  How does it strike you?

The T wrote: It's difficult to convey in words, the typical "gringo" Spanish is never free of a strong accent and the apparent inability to properly roll the "rrrrs" . Sometimes it sounds so imperfect that it feels like some people really had to learn to speak Spanish and didn't really want to do it. To be honest, it just sounds funny in most cases, but the better cases sound quite to-the-point-ish, direct, not arrogant nor humble but, how can I say it, just on point. It has a lot to do with cultural elements. Besides the pronunciation itself, the tone, the way things are said, are different in that there is a lot more of display of feelings imbedded in words when hispanics speaks Spanish than the more direct, dry, yet matter-of-factly way that Americans use when speaking Spanish.  They make the language sound more direct and utilitarian, we can say, even if the "rrrs" are left unrolled

I can roll my tongue.  However,  I think (translate in my head) about what I want to say in Spanish.  I also have difficulty with the verb tenses, so I tend to speak in the present tense. 

"Yo necessito una cerveza." 

 ^ I remember that clip, he's excellent though his Southern US is too exaggerated as I recall

People from around Indiana are known (not known?) to have really strong accents. Of course it varies, and the yip-yappiness of some country people irritates me even as a native a lot of the time.

Atavachron wrote:  ^ I remember that clip, he's excellent though his Southern US is too exaggerated as I recall

Still funny as hell though. 

I am fortunate to speak 7 languages fluently (no talent there , learned them very young!), so accents come rather easily. I spoke Hungarian at home, went to French school , lived in an English neighborhood (Montreal) , had a Spanish tutor (cubano no es lindo!) on Saturdays and a German one on Sunday.  I can also do various Brit accents, Scot is somehow easier than Irish (when I finally realized that if your jaw doesn't move from alcohol stupor, the tongue will do Irish naturally! ) , Afrikaner is quite hard to master, while English with a German accent is easy, French the same and Italian/Spanish also. Portuguese is not as pretty as Brazilian (they talk like they play futbol!) . As for my mother tongue, Hungarian is like an alien language from Mars with no resemblance to anything else.......  

Epignosis wrote: The Amy Walker bit was good except the Charleston accent is way dated.

An interesting point. I find the temporal differences in accents fascinating. For example, the way people speak in American films from the 1930's is drastically different than the way they speak now. It's a shame that recording technology is so new and we have no idea what people sounded like several centuries ago.

stonebeard wrote: http://soundcloud.com/drewagler/a-dramatic-reading/s-hQbUQ Here's me reading a paragraph from Game of Thrones. Not too intense of an accent, no?

I still say you have a nice voice, and I can't hear an accent personally.