Comments by "Jim" (@jimohara) on "Caller Likes My "Exaggerated" Spanish Pronunciations" video.
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@KristianKumpula Well, there was what was known as ‘received pronunciation’, which was used exclusively by the British Royal family, the aristocracy and the BBC when it first started up on radio 100 years ago. And that was the ‘correct’ English. But it was used by nobody nearly nobody else across the British Isles. In fact, it was looked at as bad form if any common folk chose to try and adopt it or it’s syntax. The truth is British and Irish accents are still so varied you couldn’t go twenty miles without running up against someone with a perceptible different accent and their own way of pronunciation. And that’s no exaggeration, accents are that thick and sentence structure and some words that colloquial, plus the varying speed of speech are that different across these islands that no one could possibly pretend that we don’t have trouble understanding each other.
People coming from all over the world with PERFECT English struggle understanding natives because their English is better than ours is. Americans that only speak English as their first language can struggle just as much as anyone else from any other part of the world the accents are that thick. They get understood, but so often they have no idea what the person they were talking to said or meant back to them.
I’ve friends that went Vegas and spoke to each other at the poker table and the dealer has said ‘English only’ and none of them knew any language other than English. It’s not just an American or foreigner thing, I’ve talked to people from the other end of the island and I’ll be honest, I hadn’t an F N clue what they were saying or what they were talking about. Accents that thick, even English speaking foreigners or English speaking residents listening just had to make their best guess and nod along
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