AEE 2690: 3 Strange Things Americans Do with Pronunciation with Michael from Happy English

sunny_aWDv:Michael is from New York city and now is based in Japan so again welcome Michael thank you so much. Yes thank you. Which borough? Which borough are you from? Where did you grow up in New York. I grew up in a place called long island. Long island is like next to. New York and they talk more like this. Yes. Yeah, so it's kind of like the suburbs of New York city. Yeah, I'm glad you showed us a little bit of the accent there. It's very distinctive when I hear it on TV, I know that's a long island accent, like it's even different from Manhattan, right Michael it's interesting. Yes. It's got its own unique thing. If you know cyndi lauper, the singer cyndi lauper and you check any of her interviews, she talks like that. That's how she talks. I grew up in long island and I'm a singer. Yes, she does. She's been in a couple movies I think too and she brings the accent into them as well. I love it. I love it. So that is a good a good way to sample that accent. Go find clips of cyndi lauper or bugs bunny or oh okay bugs bunny interesting. Bunny has more of a Brooklyn or New York city accent but yeah, yeah slightly to more of a Brooklyn accent. So we're getting into accents today.

sunny_aWDv:Right? But we're going to bring it one level up and talk a little bit about why American English is difficult to understand even when you know all the words. Many of our listeners feel they do know a lot of vocabulary, but sometimes have trouble understanding when American English speakers speak. Right? So what are three of the pronunciation patterns that Americans tend to use in everyday conversation? Michael, what would you say that are tricky? Reductions, reduced words, words squeezed together, linking words, right? Put it away like that. And then Americans have this really unusual relationship with the letter t, sometimes we drop it, sometimes we make it sound like a weak d, and so all these things together. Some people say, or a lot of people say, oh, Americans talk too quickly I don't think it's the speed, I think it's more the style and that's what I wanted to share with your audience today. Yeah, I love it. Well said Michael. So it's not so much the speed, it's the style, but if we know what to look for, I think that's the key piece, right? If we've primed our ears for what to actually listen for and look for, we'll understand it when it hits us right in the face. Right? Right, right. Because English, and I think especially American English, the way it sounds is usually totally different from the way it looks on the paper and so if you're, if you're, if you can have a little bit of a flexibility in your ears and don't rely on your eyes very much, you'll start to hear English from a better way or a new way. Way I think, yeah. And so from a student perspective, from a listener perspective, why does this really matter? I mean what happens to your listeners to our listeners when they're just not able to understand what does that create? So that what that does is that creates panic and loss of confidence.