For all people WITHOUT a traditional AMERICAN ACCENT:?

i like it and thats actually the one i try to do when i speak english.

im talking of what they call standard american or general american or whatever.

why? well. im a spaniard and my contact with english comes mainly though writing. i've noticed that in "educated" or standard or whatever american english they tend to pronounce all the syllables and that fits me good because i rely a lot on writing when i talk.

there other reasons. i once discovered that the RP english or queen's english( or whatever u may want to call it) that they use in the materials that reach spain was an invention from very ellitist schools in england and that is not a real people's language.

it'd be cool if that standard british english that reaches spain was really used in england by a decent proportion of the population but its not like that.

u go to england and nobody talks like your teachers. besides who wants to talk like one's teachers?

so i chose the american ways so i could piss them off. i can also take advantage of the language selection feature on dvd movies and most movies in english that i want to watch are from the usa.

besided being a spaniard (through and through) im also an andalusian with my own thick accent in my mother language. theres no way im going to talk in that haughty way hte queen of england does. im noisy and garroulus. i move my hands i butt in i do many things that are look down by ppl who drink tea with their pinky finger standing.

i like the way brits talk but since i had to choose i chose american.

and since im from nowhere were english is spoken and very rarely use english to talk to ppl face to face im not going to pick up any local accent.

so i speak english with a pinch of traditional american accent plus lots of andalusian and try to get by

I'm neither pleased nor displeased by it. First off, there are several American accents (New England, New York, Southern, Midwestern).

In all fairness though, I can understand an American much better than someone from London's East End, or many from the north of England. And very often, an Irishman speaking English is totally incomprehensible.

I'm Spanish, and I like the American Accent... sometimes, I would prefer that some Americans speak slower, but it isn't unpleasant...

I suppose it depends on where the people is from, so, only in Spain, we have very different accents in all the country, and sometimes I have problems in order to understand some accents from Andalucia or Galicia.

Hmm... the American accent sounds okay to me. It's not as difficult to understand as the British accent. But sometimes, I find the drawl in the accent kind of annoying. It sounds whiny at times.

I'm not a native English speaker. To my ears, the American accent sounds kind of "lazy" (for lack of a better description).

I don't mean this in an offensive way, but compared to British English (which we are taught in school over here) Americans don't pronounce their words that carefully. Examples? "Yall" (or however that's written) instead of "you all", "ya" instead of "you", "bein" instead of "being" (the same thing goes for all the gerunds), pronouncing the word "tomato" like tomaydo instead of tomahto, the word "dancing" like "dencin" and the word "path" like "peth". Things like that. In my foreign ears this sounds sort of lazy.

Now that I think of it it's really odd, because I have the same sense with Castillian Spanish (spoken in Spain) and Latin American Spanish. We get taught Castillian here and compared to that Latin American Spanish sounds "lazy" as well.

But having said all of this, I think there's a huge variety in American accents (and also in Latin American ones). Personally I really like the New York accent, whereas the Texan accent tends to get on my nerves.

You might be interested to know that at school we would receive lower grades for English if we proncounced it with an American accent instead of a British one! Pretty strange, huh?

When I was in the uk I wanted to have the american accent I think its kinda cool.

Now I've been in the U.S for a few month and people have told me my accent changed (and it help my singing voice somehow)

American accents to me are best described as loud. I would say americans are good talkers but not very good listeners. I like the western drawl especially the women folk. The shortening of vowels and the need to use achronims for everything is a bit of a turnoff tho.

i prefer it over an english accent but in general i like most accents because its a change from the norm (if you can understand what they are saying)

Most of them are okay, some very loud and assertive. I just find that "newsreader" accent annoying, where they have very very strong Rs. What is that called, the New York accent?

I am a Brit and love the American accent....I like it how you guys emphasize your R's.