Introduction to Accents 5: Helpful Hints

Often there are little shortcuts or tricks that help you to jumpstart learning an accent. Here, Jim Johnson leads you through a number of possible elements that might help you to nail aspects of whatever accent you're learning.

Part 1: Accent vs Dialect vs Idiolect
Part 2: Phonetics
Part 3: Placement
Part 4: Intonation
Part 5: Helpful Hints
Part 6: Prioritizing Learning Accents

www.AccentHelp.com offers actors materials for learning over 50 different accents.

A transcript of the video:

I want to talk a little bit about how, in our materials, we have a little section that we call Helpful Hints.

So oftentimes there are some things that you can do that sort of trick yourself into doing some of the things that you want to do for an accent. For example, one thing that can help a lot of the time is to physicalize whatever you're trying to do.

So with RP, for example, Standard British, Received Pronunciation there's more pitch range than what most Americans are used to, so by physicalizing that, by physicalizing that sort of movement, physicalizing, you can get it not just vocally, but you can get it by watching what you're doing, and also through doing the physical action. So you can get it kinesthetically, as well. So physicalizing whatever you're trying to accomplish oftentimes helps.

Thinking about this being an RP more speaking, as opposed to this be more American-style speaking. Sometimes that physicalization makes a big difference.

There's one bizarre one that's pretty freaky is that sometimes when people swing their arm, it seems to help them with Cockney, and in general, swinging their arms sometimes gets people to just be a little more aggressive and often times helps with working-class accents.

And keep in mind that most accents are a little bit more working-class. You're looking at stronger sort of regional or city-specific accents, oftentimes that's more typical of working-class people.

Another interesting thing that seems to key people into a lot of working-class accents, and it does another thing as well, is to allow your character to be dumber. So if you lower the IQ of your character, oftentimes it helps with almost all accents. It tends to let people do a thicker version of whatever accent they're working on.

Sometimes it's offensive to say that about an accent. You know it's in that danger zone of saying "think dumber and you'll do that more strongly" but it's interesting having lived in Texas now for a little while, even Southerners here - some Texans would be offended by me calling them Southerners - but whatever. But some Southerners the moment that you asked them to allow an IQ to drop they will just do a thicker Southern accent or a thicker Texas accent. So it's a stereotype that's kind of built into people's response. So oftentimes doing a, being dumber helps you to thicken whatever working-class accent you're working on.

Another thing that I would say is that sometimes, for example, focusing on chest resonance really opening up the low end of the voice oftentimes helps people when they are working on an accent that has lower placement. That's oftentimes another little helpful thing.

Physicalizing where the placement is for an accent, that'll oftentimes help you as well.

Physicalizing the intonation pattern will also oftentimes help you to be able to pull it off as well.

So you doing these physical actions, allowing yourself to be dumber, allowing yourself to stand up straighter when working on RP, these little tricks are some of those Helpful Hints that we look at that somehow miraculously help people to get it.

There you go! 

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