Accent Sample

southerner   Thu Oct 11, 2007 4:00 am GMT
Hi, let's play the accent game!
I'm interested in knowing how my accent sounds to you and whether one year of living in the Southern US had any effect on it.

Here's the url (9 Mb .wav file)


http://rapidshare.com/files/61723797/accent.wav
Guest   Wed Oct 17, 2007 2:37 am GMT
Well, I'm not a native speaker, but can understand you perfectly (duh!)

I think your pronunciation is good, but you still have a little accent.
if I had to guess, I would say you are probably Japanese! =P
furrykef   Wed Oct 17, 2007 3:42 am GMT
Hmm. You seem to have a problem with Ls in certain positions... the "Commonwealth" in "Commonwealth Caribbean" was difficult to understand (I had to look at the Wikipedia text to see what you were saying there), and "world" sounded more like "word". Also, the "common" part of "commonwealth" doesn't sound quite right... the first "o" should be pronounced more like "ah", and the second "o" should be a schwa.

By the way, "aviation" is usually pronounced with a long "a" at the beginning (that is, as "ay", like the name of the letter A, rather than "ah").

On the whole, though, not bad at all. Just a bit more practice on words like those and you should sound perfectly fine. :) You'd probably need considerably more to sound exactly like a native, but I wouldn't worry about that unless you're a perfectionist.

By the way, the accent doesn't sound Japanese at all to me... if I had to guess, I'd say Russian, but I could be way off.

- Kef
Guest   Wed Oct 17, 2007 3:56 am GMT
It's definitely not Russian or Japanese, gosh, don't just name a language you don't know.
Guest   Wed Oct 17, 2007 4:52 am GMT
you just named Russian!
Guest   Wed Oct 17, 2007 4:55 am GMT
oops, didn't read the other post until the end...

either way, how can you be so sure is not one or the other?
southerner   Thu Oct 18, 2007 1:00 am GMT
Thank you guys! No, I'm not interested in sounding exactly like a native, but just in making myself understood better, as I live and work in the US. Thank you for the hints, those were helpful... I just listened to my sample again and I noticed how badly I cut the final n in Carribean off, sorry about that :-)
I'm pretty proud to sound like a Russian and Japanese to you, those are two countries I admire, but I'm Italian :-) (you weren't expecting that, eh?) By the way I'd be curious to know what sounds Russian and/or Japanese in my accent to you...
Guest   Thu Oct 18, 2007 1:04 am GMT
The people who said it know neither language so their opinions don't count.
furrykef   Thu Oct 18, 2007 2:12 am GMT
Not knowing a language doesn't mean you can't identify that language! It's just that the accent wasn't strong enough to make a good guess. And I did say, more or less, that it was a wild guess. It's just that a few of the words reminded me of the Russian character Zakharov from this game, Alpha Centauri... I know that accents in movies and games are often hilariously off, but that was one game where they did take care to make things as authentic as they could.

- Kef