Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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63 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good idea shamefully executed., 8 April 2001
By A Customer
I bought this book as I am currently at Drama School in London and part of my training includes the study of accents and dialects. This subject particularly appeals to me and so when I saw this book which documents hundreds of accents from around the world, I thought it was an excellent idea, and a good reference book for an actor's shelf, particularly as a CD was included with examples of how each accent should sound. When I got the book home however, I was more than disappointed. The book itself is OK if a little technical and difficult to follow. Also it doesn't use the recognised phonetical terms but constantly relates the accents back to "standard american" which is not so useful if your natural accent is Merseyside. It was the CD however which was the real let down, particularly as it had been one of the main selling points of the book in the first place. All the examples of the accents were gross stereotypes performed by the author himself. This was probably the worst decision he could have made. If he had intended to make a serious reference volume for actors, then surely the best thing would have been to find native speakers of each accent so the listener gets a true example. Obviosly, this would have cost a fortune to the producer of the CD and so he instead opted for the ...choice of doing them himself. Appallingly. I cannot speak for or against the accuracy of most of the examples on the CD, but ALL the British accents were GROSSLY inaccurate. I share a house with an Irishman and we were in fits of hysterical laughter at his ...interpretation of how people speak in Ireland, the Scottish accent was worse than Groundskeeper Willie from the Simpsons and as for the Newcastle accent, I challenge anyone to find someone who speaks like that- there is nobody on the planet. On the whole, a great shame that more time, effort and money were not spent on what is such a good idea.
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35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Dick Van Dyke has nothing on this guy!, 10 Jun 1999
By A Customer
This book comes with a CD, which is a very good idea and I would encourage more publishers of voice and accent books to do the same.HOWEVER, if you are a publisher planning to include a CD please make sure that your author can in fact pull off the accents he claims to be able to mimic. Being English, I cannot comment on how convincing his variants of American are, but I can say with some authority that an actor perfecting his version of any one of the UK accents would be laughed off the British stage. His R.P. (received pronunciation; the English equivalent of Standard American) is comically aristocratic; his cockney makes Dick Van Dyke sound authentic; and as for his British provincial accents, not one of them is even recognisable, let alone convincing. He speech is halting and full of inappropriate glottle stops, as if he had only ever seen the dialect written down, and had never actually heard it. Having listened to the CD, I confess I now find it hard to take the book seriously: if this is the technique that he has used to learn accents, I can hardly recommend it! If you want to learn an accent then find a native speaker.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The funniest CD I've heard for ages, 11 Nov 2006
If you are an actor, and you need to learn an accent, I suggest you should not listen to the sound recordings. It couldn't be funnier if the author had tried to make it comical.
First thing to say is that I'm British. I've travelled a lot, speak several other languages, and I work at a cosmopolitan university with students from all around the world. I routinely come into contact with people from all parts of the planet, speaking their own languages and English. Now, I don't claim to be an excellent mimic--I'm not--but then I'm not trying to sell "precise, authentic instructions on how to speak in more than 100 dialects" to others.
The British accents are not even recognisable as such, and the regional variants around Britain are way off the mark. There is absolutely no point trying to mimic these attempts unless the idea is to act an American with a very poor grasp of British accents. My heart goes out to the woman who wants to perfect her Dublin accent! I laughed out loud for a good few minutes after listening to the Australian opening sentences. There was an attempt to distinguish the NZ accent, but it turned out poorly. The Canadian is side-splitting, but luckily the track stopped before things got that far. The regional American variants are also far too stereotypical, and hilarious--what is the author trying to do here?
So much for native English accents, what about the rest? Well, it takes a certain talent to make Spanish sound like a hybrid between Manuel from Fawlty Towers and Béla Lugosi's Dracula. The Mexican "pitch pattern" is worse than the pitiful Speedy González stereotypes. The Italian has a similar Lugosi sound in the background. Given the Béla Lugosi theme throughout, I was not surprised to hear the Hungarian was a more or less direct copy--has anyone heard another Hungarian speak English like Lugosi? The German is ok! But the Dutch is hopeless. There's barely any French to get to grips with, so it's hard to comment on that.
The African collection is laughable: South African is weird, East and West African are mostly useless. Chinese and Japanese accents are terrible.
In summary, if one is needed, this seems to me to be a joke. But, it's not funny if you've spent money on a copy. Even worse, if you think these accents are genuine. As another reviewer has already said, that the author considers these efforts worthwhile suggests his methods don't work.
Think very hard before buying--unless you want a laugh.
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