To many listeners Australian accent sounds weirdly strange, yet there are many who yearn to learn it, especially those looking forward towards reaching their dream destination-Australia. And, before you touch down, you have thoughtfully kept enough time in hand to make sure that you have learnt all that is about Australian accent, so that it gets easy to make good conversation and also feel at home in the Aussie land. Learning any kind of accent is never an easy cake walk and requires tremendous amount of constant watch and practice. This is precisely because, you will have to make a clear distinction between the sounds of your native accent and also learn the speech rules of the new language to adapt accordingly. It isn’t that hard to learn the Australian accent, but you’ll definitely need to practice everyday for a good amount of time and work according to the speech rules of the new language.
Here are common speech rules that you need to follow and, once you become adept to these, you’ll find just how easy it becomes to follow the conversational thread and be able to understand and reciprocate accordingly. The first and foremost thing to be kept in mind while learning Australian accent is that, Australians make very little facial movement as they speak. They are more or less literally tight lipped as they speak and make minimal lip movement to form the consonants. Another remarkable sound ‘AY’ is pronounced like ‘IE’. So that when Australians say its Monday , they are actually saying ‘mon-die’. When used in a sentence its sounds like, `Mond-ie is a good-die’.
In a similar vein, do not be surprised if you find the Aussies taking their double T’s for a D, quite unlike their British or American counterparts. To them, when they say `butter’, it actually sounds like `budder’. Similarly `latter’ sounds like `ladder’, and do not be surprised if they say ‘liddle’ especially when they want to say ‘little’. Another significant aspect of Australian accent is that, the speech rules require the user to drop the ‘R’ at the end of the word. This rule is not applied if the word ending with R is preceded with a word that begins with a vowel. An example in case would be the word ‘doctor’ which sounds like ‘docto’ or even ‘mother’ that an Australian would pronounce like ‘mothuh’. Keeping the exception in mind, this rule would not apply in the following case say for example, ‘an obedient officer’. In this case the last R gets pronounced because the word in the front begins with a vowel. Remember, it’s a common practice in Australian speech rules to drop the last word. Rest, it all depends on practice. The more you practice, the better you get at it.
Download free manual HERE and read carefully!