Yuri Iwamoto wrote:@Shiromi: I think you sound a bit American, an the rolled rs, lol.
Hime-Chan wrote:@ Shiromi: I'd something close to American standard pronunciation? Your voice is really clear, but the way you speak your R is very american!
mangaluva wrote:@Shiromi: you sound very American.
Yup, I'm an American. I speak the North-Western dialect of American English (I've lived in Montana most of my life. Contrary to popular opinion, Montanans don't sound like Texans. We sound like we're from Washington state), which is very close to the standardized American English dialect used for newscasters on TV. That's why my voice sounds "clear" - it's more that I'm speaking a dialect that more people are familiar with than the quality of my voice.
There's only one big difference between my speech and the TV-news speech - my dialect has one less vowel. My dialect doesn't differentiate between "ah" and "aw", so words like "cot" vs "caught" sound the same when I say them.
And my trouble with R-rolling: I was born with a bound tongue, which means a flap of skin connected my tongue to the floor of my mouth all the way to the end. I couldn't lift or stick my tongue out at all, affecting my speech in several ways: my Ts, Ds, and Ns are articulated off the backs of my teeth, instead of off my alveolar ridge, and all of my Ls are velar (sometimes called a "dark" L, it's made in the back of your mouth and usually found in Ls at the ends of words in English) instead of off the alveolar ridge. I couldn't do the Alveolar tap at all - the sound that replaces a T or D between vowels, also the sound that is the Japanese R - so I used a post-dental D instead. The flap of skin wasn't cut until I was 14 - too late to learn how to roll an R with any ease. I've trained hard though, and I can now make the Alveolar tap! The Alveolar tap is actually really, really close to a rolled R, so I've been using studying Japanese to get closer to being able to roll Rs fluently. That and singing along to Norwegian folk-rock.
Sorry about the impromptu lecture on phonetics...
Other people should post stuff where we can here you speak, because comparing dialects is fun!
