Which accent is the 'standard' accent for English learners?
Which accent is the 'standard' accent for English learners? I mean...which type of accent is the best accent for pronounciation for an English learner, in your opinion?
6 Answers
Tastes apart, as a learner of English I find the British accent one of the clearest and easiest to understand. It sounds more neutral to me, but I could be influenced because all the English that I learnt was taught by British's teachers (and consequently also the spelling and the way of talking).
Talking about UK, I find particularly delightful the way how Scottish people speak, and maybe too much affected the Liverpool accent. But I'm generalising, because I suppose that, at the end, clarity depends mainly on the person. A clear voice and a well spoken language are nice in every languages, no matter the accent.
I would say that your accent is likely to be influenced by who is teaching you or where you are speaking. There is no 'better' accent, but I think that the point made about learning an accent that corresponds with where you might want to use the language (i.e. in the States or UK for instance) is a very good idea.
I'm currently learning Spanish in Chile but am most likely going to be using it in the future in Northern Spain. Now that's going to be confusing...
I think standard accent does not mean it´s the best accent to start.
I think standard accent would be an authoritative choice and ´the best accent to start´ would be an individual choice.
But if you don´t know the language at all, how will you make a good choice?
For years I was taught and evaluated according to RP English. It was a good start. Although I suspected nobody spoke like that in real life, listening London street talk in my first stages pf learning was quite discouraging.
I do not know which one would be it´s equivalent in Spanish.
Received Pronunciation (RP), also called the Queen's (or King's) English, Oxford English, or BBC English, the accent of Standard English in England, with a relationship to regional accents similar to the relationship in other European languages between their standard varieties and their regional forms.
Although there is nothing intrinsic about RP that marks it as superior to any other variety, sociolinguistic factors give Received Pronunciation particular prestige in England and Wales.
However, since World War II, a greater permissiveness towards allowing regional English varieties has taken hold in education and in the media in England.
Source: Wikipedia (bolds & italics are mine)
Colombian Spanish sounds the cleanest to me.
I'd assume learning English with an American accent would be easier than learning English with a British accent just because surprisingly enough, British English phonetics are even more difficult than American English phonetics, in a sense that there are a lot of weird rules.
I would imagine that the ideal accent would be the one that represents the group of people with whom the learner hopes to or will be interacting the most with in the future. For example, if I was born in Mexico but had dreams of living in Lancashire, England then I would probably be better off trying to learn a Lanky accent than a Bronx accent (along with its respective idioms and speech patterns), right?
