062Y55A03 14/04 American and British English

POSTED THIS PREVIOUSLY, BUT WITHOUT CLASS NUMBER SO YOU PROBABLY DIDN'T SEE IT. MY APOLOGIES.

For Tongue Twisters, find the post that is simply called Tongue Twisters. I give them out at many classes so it doesn't have your class number on it.


So really, there is nothing very much to write about today, as we spent the whole class on pronunciation.

As I said, it is important to get the pronunciation right but please, please, don't let that stop you from talking. The MOST important thing is communication and you can do that by sign language, body language, or just repeating something until the other person understands. Don't think that because you mix up your "a"s and "e"s you should not talk in case someone misunderstands.All this class was about was helping. Each one of you speaks English very well (truly) so this was just about making things maybe a little clearer.

I did not realise myself that in Speech competitions they deduct marks if you mix up American and British pronunciation. I wouldn't worry too much about it (unless you are taking part in a competition) as many Chinese people do it. I think this is because those of you who have had foriegn teachers have listened to the different accents. One time you may have an American teacher, another time an English one, so its difficult to seperate the two ways of speaking.

In any case, no matter which accent you use, many of the words used as Standard English in China are American words and not British ones anyway: e.g. Apartment for Flat. Escalator for Lift, Gas for Petrol, Candy for Sweets. As you will see, in most cases American English uses the longer word - the rest of us are too lazy! Also, since I came here I and other British English speakers have had to learn some new words like Freshmen, Sophomore etc. which are American and we have never heard before.

I think by the time a Chinese English emerges it will be a mixture of the two different forms anyway.

The tongue twisters I give out are really very helpful and, for those of you who are interested in learning English for your future careers, practising them often will be a big help. They were not made up just to help non-native users, they are the ones we ourselves use to ensure that we are speaking clearly. I used to teach The Art of Speech to native English speakers and, before they were going to give a speech or enter a competition, we would repeat many of them to ensure that the pronunciation was clear and correct. As an actor, too, I use many of them before going on-stage.

O.k. I hope to be able to do a lesson using hip-hop and rap next week: unfortunately my USB device picked up a virus from one of those classroom computers (which made me very cross), so I am hoping one of my friends can de-bug it for me by then.

That's also the reason why I haven't posted photos that people have sent: they were downloaded onto the device and I haven't dared to use it since it became corrupted.