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Originally Posted by RonBee Is a New Zealand accent anything like an Aussie accent? (Steve Irwin is pretty easy to understand.) |
New Zealanders will tell you they are not similar in any way; but to my ears they seem pretty similar. If anything, the Aussie accent seems much stronger.
Sometimes when I talk to our NZ teachers, I can't hear a difference in pronunciation between "hear", "here" and "hair"; or "beer" and "bear"
I simply try to tell students to listen for those differences and learn them - it will help them to understand. It's the same with Chinese. The standard mandarin pronunciation of the word for foreigner is "lao wai" (lao why) but here in Dalian, the "ai" sound is pronounced as "ei" (ay), so they say "lao wei (lao way). Once I recognised that difference - and others like it - , conquering the regional language barrier was pretty easy :D
Another example: in BE, we pronounce it "stop", but to my ears, Americans pronounce it "stup" (my approximation!)
I think that recognising little differences like these play an important part in dealing with different accents, and getting over that hurdle :wink:
What do others think?