I Don't Hear Accents...?

I get where you're coming from. I've got better at it overtime, but I still have some difficulty distinguishing certain accents. I'm not good at putting on fake accents either, like if you asked me to put on an American accent I'd be completely lost.

To some extent, I can put on German, Russian and a Scouse accents. My German pronunciation is apparently quite good, surprisingly. I tend to struggle placing certain accents, and sometimes I've had teachers who have had foreign accents and people have been like "I love their X accent!" and I've usually been left thinking "they had an accent?".

In fact, I had an interview a few months back with an interviewer when I applied (and was rejected) for work experience. People were asking me what their accent was, but I had no idea. "How can you not know? That's ridiculous!" were the kind of responses I got.

I've become more aware of accents since I moved area, as the pronunciation here is quite noticeably different on some words.

 

Yup, I can distinguish between accents. Broadly between British accents, I can tell a Northern to Southern to Western accent but American/Austrlian accents I wouldn't be able to tell where in the country they were from.

I mean the ones you mentioned: Aus, British and American are all Western accents whose primary language tends to be English. We all use the same words and similar phrases it's just dialect thats different. I've heard Americans tend to think that British and Australian accents sounds really similar so you're not alone there. You can still tell that there's a difference between an American accent and a Jamaican one? You're good. Nothing to stress over. Some people just have different sensory levels.

 

Unless it's really distinct, I don't hear them either. For the life of me, I can't tell the difference between how most east coast and west coasters talk (like if we have specific and different accents).

 

I wonder if you have to practice to attune your ear to them. My partner can't tell the difference between a lot of them, just that some are incomprehensible to her. But she's Japanese and English is her second language. She can only understand Canadian and various US accents but NOT the US accents from where I was born! She can't understand my mom at all!

I can differentiate between accents very well but I make it a point to because pronunciation and enunciation both fascinate me and knowing about vowel sounds and things like that. However, I don't always know where the differing accents come from specifically. Like last night I was watching a video and the main participant had this awesome accent I loved listening to and I was like, "Australian!" But then I read a little about the context of the video and his from New Zealand. I can tell when someone is Scottish or Irish, but not from where in Scotland or Ireland. I can tell when an actor is Canadian even when they're playing an American. I can kind of regionally differentiate a few Canadian accents. I'm much better at US accents, of course. However even within my own regional accent and dialect, it's hard for me to tell exactly where a person is from while some people I know are better at it.

Also I want to stress none of this involves judging the way people speak. I love all of them. Oh and people from where I'm from say I don't have our regional accent but as soon as I talk to people from other places in the US they IMMEDIATELY place me in the general vicinity of my birthplace! It's so weird to me. And I don't exactly practice not speaking with our regional accent. I do notice it comes on very thickly the tireder I am, but I think I learned to speak from watching TV and so I have like a generic midwestern or even California style accent. Although living in Japan has morphed it increasingly into what they used to call a "Mid-Atlantic" accent. I also increasingly use my partner's pronunciation of things like "time," which sounds to me a lot like "toime."