Please listen to this recording and write the sentence exactly as it is spoken.
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If he hadnât been driving so fast, he wouldnât have hit the motorcyclist.
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If he hadnât been driving so fast he wouldnât have hit the motorcyclist
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If he hadnât been driving so fast he wouldât have hit the motorcyclist
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If he hadnât not been driving so fast he wouldnât have hit the motorcyclist
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Yes, it is: If he hadnât been driving so fast, he wouldnât have hit the motorcyclist. (A good Type III conditional sentence!)
(By the way, @Torsten, which accent is this? I mean the nationality of the speaker as I donât think it is American or British)
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Hi @Anglophile! I have a standard North American accent!
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Hi @LaceyGee, thanks for registering and responding to Lawrenceâs question. I think you answer his question about your nationality better than me just talking about you in the third person. After all, learning English is about connecting with people.
We are currently working on a new version of our website that will include all of your 100 recordings and allow our users to listen to them through their personal accounts in addition to the open forum. Our plan is to continue working with you once we see how our users respond to the new interface. Please let me know if this makes sense.
Thank you very much, Torsten
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Thank you, Torsten. Your new version of our site sounds great!
And, I thank you too, @LaceyGee.
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No problem at all @Anglophile! I didnât know how much to expand on it but since this is supposed to be about connecting, I will!
Iâm actually from the south and used to have quite the Georgia/ southern accent but after years of radio and training in Texas, I was taught to drop the accent! My accent is considered Northern American, but it is pretty neutral. That is the preferred accent for the industry that I work in but when I go home to Georgia, but my southern accent can quickly creep back in!
And thank you for the info, @Torsten! I look forward to it!
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Well, what weâre looking for here at English.best is a variety of accents in addition to the âstandard accentâ because the reality is that most people donât have a standard accent and the world wouldnât be half as interesting and diverse if everyone sounded exactly the same. So weâre glad youâre from the South and can speak a variety of accents.
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Thatâs a very good and innovative approach, Torsten!
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If he hadnât been driving so fast, he wouldnât have hit the motorcyclist.
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To my ears, you have a standard American accent.
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Interesting.
To my ear, @LaceyGeeâs accent sounds like sheâs from Los Angeles.
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When I listened to these recordings before, I thought I detected a very slight accent but couldnât identify it.
This sounds like what we call a neutral accent. I should point out that neutral implies that itâs majority, but thatâs not the case. Itâs the accent in much of central US, and southwest US (not including Texas).
As LaceyGee pointed out, people in radio are taught the âneutralâ accent. Same with television, movies, etc. For this reason, itâs heard throughout the US (and the rest of the world). Even tough itâs a minority accent, people hear it so much that they donât hear it as different from their own.
For example I have a Midwest accent. I didnât even know I had an accent until I moved away to college and people started mentioning it. I could not detect it being different than the âneutralâ accent.
There are also different dialects. There are some words that I use that people in other parts of the country donât know what they mean. We commonly leave the âlyâ off of adverbs. We use a LOT of non-standard contractions. Sometimes we completely omit the end of words (partly because we talk fast).
We say âThe car needs washedâ or âThe garden needs wateredâ. I was in my 30s when I was first told there was something wrong with that. I had no idea what they were talking about. Even after it was explained to me, I still donât see anything wrong with it. If itâs widespread like it is here, then there is no such thing as âwrongâ.
Anyway, I totally agree that English learners should hear different accents and dialects. They also need to learn casual English. People donât speak formal English. They donât use perfect grammar.
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I know quite a few Americans who use just this kind of construction, and they are all highly educated and well-read. They have simply developed an effective way to express a thought or idea in a concise way.
Many Germans do not understand this and think that an American who uses such âprimitiveâ language is not educated. It is the other way around, because language must always serve a purpose, and that is to get a point across. If you say to another native speaker, âThe car needs washed,â you have made your point succinctly. In this case, there is no need to use a complicated construction. The same person is also capable of describing highly complex issues in detail in a scientific paper. One does not exclude the other.
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I donât think they are intentionally trying to be concise. This is the way everyone talks around here regardless of intelligence or education.
But yea, people from other places seem to think that certain kinds of speech are unintelligent or uneducated.
A teacher I had in college would use the word âseenâ instead of âsawâ. For example âI seen the movie.â or âI seen him do that.â This was in California where they rarely hear anything like that. One of my classmates said at first he thought the teacher was a total idiot. After a couple of classes he realized that the teacher was one of the most intelligent people he ever met or was likely to meet. He was also a top notch teacher who could make complex topics seem easy.
If youâve ever watched Richard Feynman lecture, he can make advanced topics in physics easily understood by people with no physics background. This teacher I had was the same way, except he talked like a total hillbilly. I spent most of my life surrounded by very intelligent engineers and scientists, many of them hillbillies. Some of the most intelligent people Iâve known were hillbillies. They were from poor coal mining families and managed to break out of that cycle and make something of themselves.
Yâall might think their stupid but they ainât. Them hillbillies are involved in some of the most advanced technologies and science anywhere. Some of them ainât never lost their way of tawkin. They still tawk the way their kinfolk do down home.
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