British Pronunciation Tips! Sound More British (Modern/ModifiedRP Accent)

hello everybody this is elliot from etj english not macaulay culkin so many of you guys have been writing comments saying um elliot you look like that guy that kid in home alone well i'm sorry i'm in no way related to him you should see my brother though he really does look like macaulay culkin today in this video we're going to be talking about a few different ways in which um you can sound more british everything i talk about is pronunciation i'm a pronunciation teacher and i think there are a few different things which we can

do to just sound a little bit more british faster to make it happen faster we need to focus on a few different things now these kind of four things that i'm going to tell you today are not all the things you need to do they're just a few just a few little ideas for you to practice and to think about when you're trying to sound a bit more british the first thing that i would like to talk to you about is when we should and shouldn't use the letter or the sound er the r so

first of all americans they pronounce the r they have a rhotic r whereas in british english it's a little bit more complicated so when words finish with the letter r we do not pronounce it better we use the schwa now if you haven't seen my video about the schwa sound you can go back and watch that on my channel but an american they would say better when they do this er on the end now british english we pronounce it as an uh better so a few more words we have weather okay another schwa at the

end because it's an er and also if we have words that simply end with just the letter r for example here here and that sound at the end is actually called a diphthong the ear sound and we'll talk about that in another video so when do we pronounce the r in british english when it's in a word well we only pronounce the r when it appears before a vowel sound for example listen to this sentence i'm going to drive around the area in my car i'm going to drive around the area in my car so

we pronounce the rs in the words like area drive because there is a vowel after that r but the word car there's no vowel after that okay so generally that's what happens we also have something else in british english which is related to connected speech in pronunciation and this is called the intrusive r or the linking r now this is when we join our words with an r okay now i'm not going to talk about that in this video because that would take a long time it's quite detailed but for example if i was asking

my friend where he is instead of saying where are you where are you what i will do is i will link with an arm where are you where are you and this is because we're lazy we need to join our words together and make it sound more native more smooth and just easier to come out of the mouth and that's what we call the intrusive r or the linking art the next tip that i want to give you is to drop your teas use the glottal t sometimes and why sometimes why can't i say a

bottle of water well the reason why is because really that's only kind of used with cockney accents um generally if you want to be you know to have that kind of standard sounding british accent the southern british accent um not rp because rp is is not used really anymore about two percent of the population uses rp english now but if you want kind of a normal british southern accent then generally we will drop our teas sometimes in less formal occasions even in formal occasions sometimes i've been in job interviews before where i might drop the

t on the word it say for example it was good instead of saying it was good to give you a few more examples i could say where is it where is it instead of saying where is it you know we can do that but we can pronounce the t you can do either but i just think sometimes it's good to drop a t because it will make you sound that little bit more british and just have that kind of british sound to your voice one more i could say to my friend i'll see you a

little bit later a little bit later so i'm pronouncing the t in little but because bit isn't really that much of an important word in that sentence it's kind of what we would call a function word we drop it a little bit later okay so we just kind of drop that t on the end to make it easier quicker and more british so continuing on the last thing i want to tell you are two sounds that i think are very important to british english now there are a lot of sounds that are important to british

english but these two are particularly good to know and hopefully this will give you a good idea so first of all the o sound so sound that would be in words like a lot problem what forgot so it's that o sound where we kind of make this shape with our mouth like that like a fish and the reason why this is important is because for example americans and a lot of non-natives learn to pronounce it in the american way which would be ah so for example problem instead of problem problem problem pra so we don't

want that r or r sound we want it to be an o if we want to sound more british i'm sorry my american accent is terrible by the way for example in a sentence what's the problem what's the problem okay and finally the the other sound which i think is quite important is the er sound for example in a word like words or work i want to wear a purple shirt on thursday i want to wear a purple shirt on thursday now an american would pronounce that as er purple shirt and we don't want that

we want it to be an er sound if we want that more british sound there's a very difficult sound to learn all of my skype students find that sound difficult maybe one day i'll do a video about this if you want me to please tell me your feedback really helps now that's the end of that video hopefully those tips will get you started on your journey to sounding a little bit more british if you have any other questions or anything if you want me to continue this series please tell me and i'll make another video

soon um don't forget to follow me on social media facebook instagram twitter all of that stuff um visit my website if you would like to book a skype pronunciation lesson and finally don't forget to give me a thumbs up and subscribe if you enjoyed the video and leave me a comment and tell me how much you love me see you in the next video cheers