How To Do Standard English Accents: From Traditional RP to the New 21st-Century Neutral Accent Paperback – 1 Mar. 2012

I am an English language teacher, and learned RP yonks ago at school. However, this book is a useful reminder of the nuisances of British English.Could one use this book without a teacher? Yes. However, you must download the audio files to gain the correct pronunciation.If English is not your first language then do not waste your money because this book is not designed to teach you English. It is a ‘pronunciation’ course for actors for native English speakers.

This is a reasonable handbook with reasonable recordings which all the same shies away from the standard terminology of phonetics (to be fair, many similar books do the same). One pet peeve, for example, is "crunching" instead of "coalescence" (or maybe "assimilation"?). For goodness sake, why is this done? If you were writing a pop science book about astronomy, would you talk about "big round things that go round the Sun", or "planets"? Gee, even if you were writing about body-building, you wouldn't talk of the "big soft blob on your upper leg that you want to make firmer". You'd talk of "quads (or even quadriceps) exercises". Are actors less bright than body builders? Are people who read about pronunciation morons?

Good book but it was far from clear how to download the online resources, instructions are on Page 234 of the book.

The book appears to be excellent and the clearest I have seen in its explanations and examples and I am really pleased with it. However, the web address for '[...]' is not available, stating that it is suspended. I don't know if this is permanent or if it has changed to another web site. Would appreciate response to this.

I bought this book to help 'flatten' my regional accent to a 'near-modern RP' version, rather than learn other, more narrowly-defined forms of RP, so I can only comment on a limited part of the contents.Although aimed at actors I found the section on modern RP to be both useful and interesting for my own purposes.

As required

Very good and clear. Could do with a picture to show the vowel positions all on one chart. Excellent description of variants of different eras; I now know how to speak like Terry-Thomas!

Battled a little with this but all download links for the resources for this book are gone. The book itself is great but without any of the resources (examples of sounds etc), with all email links to the author being no longer functional and seemingly no other response to the other review about this I can only hope that negative reviews will alert the publisher.