Serpent wrote:Indeed, the fact that any British accent has some class correlation is off-putting for me. Besides, afaiu RP requires being closer to perfection, otherwise you're just a very good foreigner.
I would mostly just like to sound generally European rather than Russian/Slavic. My Canadian friend said I sound Iberian
And well, I did have English (and general) phonetics classes at uni
Though tbh I think sometimes I'm harder to understand than someone who isn't too concerned about the fluidity and minor details.
Oh and one problem with the idea that you work until you develop the best possible accent is that it takes time, and the returns diminish as soon as your speech is intelligible. I still care about improving my English (especially the vocab and the pronunciation of the* words I've only seen/used in writing), but it's obviously not the highest priority language for me.
*and accepting that if "the" is needed, it's needed, no matter how clumsy it looks to me
Just to make it clear: I was not saying that you should try to imitate RP (or anything else), but that
if you wanted to imitate an English accent, then the two I mentioned were the only realistic choices, and I stand by that. (We can go into why, if you like, but I won't do so here).
However, while admitting that there is a class issue with British accents, that's much more to do with British society, and needn't worry you in the slightest unless you decide to come to live here. George Bernard Shaw wrote
It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.
http://www.bartleby.com/138/0.htmlIf that was ever true, it is much less true nowadays, although there is a grain of truth in it. But as has been said, RP is more like a spectrum, and most RP speakers sound nothing like the queen. Some have obviously "public school" accents, and examples of this would be Jeremy Paxman (BBC), Jon Snow (Channel 4), or perhaps Jeremy Irons.
I don't think aiming for a version of RP would involve aiming for perfection, but more like neutrality. I was trying to think of a more "neutral" sounding RP speaker, and first thought of Alan Rickman, but then I noticed a London (not-quite cockney)-ish twang, so I wouldn't call that neutral either, but in this piece with Kate Winslet, Kate actually sounds like my idea of "neutral" RP:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfGrSRcrj84The main danger of aiming for a neutral accent (and it would be similar with General American I think) is that it might end up sounding a bit bland. However, that is still a lot safer than learning some more obscure regional accent, with all the risks that entails, and I don't think I need to spell them out.