australian accents

Hi...my name's Melanie. i was wondering if anyone could teach me how to get an australian accent. right now i have a british one. Please answer ASAP. THANX

are you kiding? lol

I dont think there is anyone could tech how to get a certain accent, because it comes by itself , so dont wast your time , because even if you spend the rest of your life in Australia you accent would never change

Move to Australia. After 10 years Australians will still recognise your
British accent, and Britishers will hear your Australian one. We've got better beaches, cheaper steaks and better cars - among other things.

Melanie, why do you want to replace your British accent (which one by the way?) with an Australian one?

You will sound silly unless you have been to Australia and can therefore justify having it.

Hi Simon, whassup to you?
she sounds not only silly but she sounds funy. Everyone likes to talk to Brits. And prefer English accent. But she ... what a strange bird...

If she wants to learn an accent for the fun of it, it's her right. Why tax her with silliness, funniness or even strangeness?
I think she was just asking for a website or something.

Melanie, it won't help a lot but here's a recording of some sentences spoken with the Australian accent and the phonetic transcription: http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/english3.html

I took it from this site: http://www.uk-yankee.com/language.html

Another recording here: http://www.abc.net.au/streaming/newsradio.ram

A page explaining how difficult it can be for an Australian to make himself understood by a foreigner: http://www.australianbeers.com/culture/generallingo.htm

A non-comprehensive page about the Phonetic of different accent including the Australian one: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/ee/COM/Home_Yan_Qin/intro/APIntro.htm

From the same site, overview of Australian English Accent: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/ee/COM/Home_Yan_Qin/intro/intro_au.htm

A link page for numerous sites about phonetic: http://asso.univ-lyon2.fr/aloes/links.htm

That's pretty all I know.

Yeah, learning accents is useful if you like acting, whether as a profession or just for fun (fooling people that you are Australian when you are British or American, etc.). But I do think it's important to be proud of the way you talk. Even if the mandates of society force you to learn a "standard" accent or dialect, preserving how you talk is part of your identity.

Ryan

I don't really know if you actually can change your accent..

Keep the British accent, Melanie. The Australian Accent sounds extremely irritating to my ears. Imagine an Australian suicide bomber exclaiming "todie is the die to die" when he means "today is the day to die".

I've only ever heard about that today/die thing on these boards. They sound completely different.

Isn't that a cliché about Cockneys too? I'm thinking about Dick Van Dyke in Moiry Poppins, squire.

"Ha! Ha! Guofei Ma!" that's a big funny joke: "todie is the die to die".

The Australian accent sounds extremely irritating to Guofei Ma's ears therefore Melanie should keep the British accent: bollocks. Guofei Ma's are not the only set of ears out there.

Guofei Ma's entitled to Guofei Ma's opinion but there is nothing inherently irritating to the Aussie accent. It's just another accent. There is nothing inherently irritating to any accent. It's just a matter of taste.

Nor it there anything silly or strange about any particular accent. There may be something silly and strange about having an accent that doesn't belong to you, though.

I reckon people should stick to there own accents rather than faking someone else's. That is for every day stuff, though. If you want to put on a foreign accent for a lark, for acting or whatever, just on the odd occasion; why not?

Though, like Jack says, you'll never prefect the Aussie accent ... one thing he forgot to mention though is that you've got better beer. Have a look at this site which explains the differences in how vowels are pronounced between four different dialects of English.
http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/units/ling210-901/phonetics/ausenglish/auseng_vowels.html

You never hear the "today"/"to die" jokes in Australia. This is not because they make fun of our own accent, we Aussies love to poke fun at ourselves. It's because they just don't make sense to us.

The difference between "day" & "die", "they" & "thy", "say" & "sigh", "pay" & "pie", "bay" & "buy", etc. are perfectly clear in the Aussie accent. Just as clear as the differences between "cat" & "cut", "pat" & "putt", "bat" & "but", "hat" & "hut", etc.

The jokes are funny if you're careful to place the misunderstanding on one of the characters in the joke. If you're saying that Aussies actually do pronounce "day" like "die", then the joke's on you.

I forgot to ask - which Australian accent?

Do you want an Australian rural working class accent? Remember then to end every sentence with "eh". Sixty, maybe forty years ago this was the source of the jokes about "day" and "die". The speakers of the modern version are mostly not very clever and mostly not very well educated, having left school as soon as it was legally possible so they didn't have to have to be "inside". Not a good image.

How about a young girl accent and end all sentences with a rising inflection? You need to be a Neighbours or Home and Away fan for that. Everyone else thinks it's ridiculous.

Then there are Adelaide accents which seem to have a good dollop of (non-cockney) Englishness about them. Mainly because of all the English immigrants who went there in the 50s to work in the car factories.

And then there is the standard "educated" Australian which is the local equivalent of "received pronunciation". It does not seem to offend the kind of reverse snobs who attack the English "received pronunciation" in this forum.

I like that one: "reverse snobs".