Quote:
Originally Posted by baqarah131  If I understate, perhaps you overstate. |
In my experience, native speakers are an extremely poor judge of this sort of thing. It becomes obvious when you hear non-native speakers struggling with pronunciation, but you really know just how radically different the two vowel systems are when you discover that the only way to explain to an American how to pronounce "pap" in a British accent is to tell them to imitate somebody from Chicago saying "pop".
Added to which, of course, is the added complication that just as there are many dialects of British English, there are also many, often radically different, dialects of American English. Compare the accents of the characters in, say,
Cheers with those in
Dallas, for example.