Customer Reviews

Accents: A Manual for Actors

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The range and usefulness of this book is quite astonishing. Not only does the text provide important sounds, stress and pitch and mouth/tongue positions for more than 80 accents of English as spoken all over the globe, but the author illustrates them with great versatility on the accompanying CD. I learned the difference between several Irish accents, heard a Cockney Yiddish and the same phrase spoken in several regions of the American South. It is an invaluable book for the actor or anyone who finds accents intriguing. A vibrant plus is the erudite and highly readable introductory essays to each language group which give a history of the country and its language, and include many examples of recordings and films in which you can hear fine examples of English spoken with that accent. I now understand why my Swedish daughter-in-law and Southern husband speak as they do,and am looking forward to perfecting my Dublin accent. A gift for anyone in theater or film, or anyone who is fascinated by the many ways our language can be spoken.

Robert Blumenfeld has made a reference for almost every conceivable accent the modern actor may be called upon to employ. British RP and Irish accents are listed here, as are French and Italian. However, Blumenfeld also includes Lithuanian, Basque, Gullah, and a host of others.

This is a bold attempt for a 320 page book. Blumenfeld has moved away from the standard practice of using monologues or pages and pages of sentences written down in a bastardized phonetic structure to teach these accents. Such approaches do have their place, but a work of Blumenfeld's scope would be need to become a series of several volumes in order to employ such methods.

There are small number of phonetic representations, usually several sentences per accent. Blumenfeld's focus, however, rests upon correct placement of the vocal apparatus and detailed descriptions of how the accent will change any text into which it comes in contact. This is perhaps the most important feature of the book. It describes a process of understanding and working with your brain and vocal instrument instead of simply memorizing how to say words differently.

However, I must stress that this is a practical book, not an academic book on accent theory. Blumenfeld provides this information with an end result in mind. This book will teach you how to employ your desired accent. You can apply its principals to any monologue or scene, even improvise, and it will work.

The CD is also very useful. While the it does not have examples of every accent the book covers, it does have a fair amount. All of accent work is done by Blumenfeld himself, and therefore you can see how one person's voice can change dramatically through this process.

Wow, when I went looking for a book to help me learn how to do accents I had no idea I'd find this. It seems to cover just about every American accent you could want. The CD that is included with it is invaluable. Within just a few days I was speaking like an English Gentleman. I have been trying to get that accent down for years. I work in a popular cafe here in Hollywood. We get many customers from London. I can even fool them. They ask me what part I'm from. They are amazed when I turn the accent off. Then, just for kicks, I'll start talking like I'm from Kentucky or the Bronx. This book is great for everyone who wants to add spice to their personalities, not just actors. Did I mention I get more dates when I use the accents I learned from this book?

You will not learn an accent from this book. Let's start with that for a statement of fact.

An accent is integrated with the way a person speaks his or her native language. The way a person holds his or her mouth while speaking. This pattern is learned by imitating the sounds of speech a person hears every day between the ages of nine months and three years. To learn an accent, you must master the way the jaw, soft palette, nasal cavity, and tongue are held in speaking with certain accents.

That said, you could actually learn how to hold your mouth for an accent by imitating sounds, just like a baby does. It takes more willful effort and study as an adult, but it can be done. And this book will give you the sounds to imitate and the structure to assume.

Vocal coach Robert Blumenfeld eschews the lengthy dialect monologues that are usually preferred in textbooks like this one, in favor of practice words and sentences that allow you as speaker to familiarize yourself with the structure of your vocal apparatus. Simple hard work and repetition is the key to achieving any accent accurately, and this book, with accompanying CD, is a good way to go about it.

Not everyone will find this book equally useful. Women, for example, will find this book more difficult to work with than men. Though the printed contents are just as useful for women as for men, the audio portion may not be. Blumenfeld presents himself speaking in the accents he's trying to convey. Women will not find it impossible to learn an accent by imitating him, but they will have a harder time creating a more feminine-sounding variant of the accent in question. This is especially true where it comes to certain Khosian accents and the native accents of East and Southeast Asia, where men and women vocalize differently, and accents are inflected according to gender.

Likewise, those interested in accents other than Euro-American will be at a loss. These accents are treated very stintingly, and are sometimes lumped together in a broad, unfair manner, as the accents of Africa are. However, it is a simple fact that these accents are less in demand, theatrically, than Euro-American accents, so there's less call to spend precious CD time and print space on them.

You may take my experience as representative, moreover, when I tell you that Blumenfeld's book can help you learn accents, but familiarity with this book does not make you a qualified dialect coach. As it turns out, that job is actually profoundly complex, and just because you are able to speak with an accent does not mean you are able to teach it to anyone else. Your best bet is simply to place this book in somebody's hands when they have plenty of time to practice, and wish them the best of luck.

Despite these problems, this book remains a fair and valuable introduction to accents. Its structure, though it won't work for everybody, will help most people most of the time in getting the hang of the accent they desire to emulate. Just remember, the most important part of learning a new accent is not memorizing and imitating sounds, but holding your mouth correctly, and this book's method will teach that to you if you're willing to learn.

I have found "Accents" an indispensable addition to this actor's book shelf. It is careful, complete, scholarly yet a thoroughly enjoyable read. Actors facing tough accents will breath a sigh of relief when they find the enclosed CD. I've been cast as Van Helsing, the dutch professor in "Dracula" at Fauquier Community Theater, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, some 50 miles west of D.C. After absorbing the chapter on dutch accents, reviewing the CD and practicing diligently, I feel I mastered the accent at much the same pace as memorization of the script. That competence has translated to earlier-than-normal layering of character well before opening.I also found the author, Mr. Blumenfeld, very friendly and forthcoming with additional guidance. This is a gem, and I recommend it to friends in theatre. And to those who are convinced they have an accent "down pat," compare yourself to the CD and prepare to be humbled and learn.

Now in a fully revised and expanded new edition, Accents: A Manual For Actors by professional actor and dialect coach Robert Bluemfeld is a 425 page compendium of detailed and "student friendly" instruction for actors seeking to learn how to perform their lines in anyone of more than a hundred different dialects. Superbly organized into nine broad categories (The British Island and Commonwealth; North America; Romance Languages; Germanic Languages, Slavic Languages; Miscellaneous European; Middle Eastern; African; and Asian), each individual section provides an intensive breakdown of the accents found within the broader category. Enhanced with two accompanying CD discs, Accents is a complete and highly recommended single volume course which will prove to be an invaluable addition to any personal, professional, community theater, or school theater department's reference collection.

I am a New York theater actress and I use this guide ALL. THE. TIME. Its range is truly amazing, and (at least to my ears) the dialects are very well done. This book and CD have helped me land many a theater job! Highly recommended.

Unfortunatley, most of the book is simply a description of each langauge and its origins. Towards the end of these descriptions are a pitiful few examples of how to pronounce each accent. I had to return this book for it was did not have enough examples to perfect any one accent.

This book was an incredible help for me. I am a college theater major and there is no accent missing from this book. It is so thorough that it's not a big help if you need to learn an accent quickly.

The cd's that come with it are also a great big help. To actually hear it spoken can be a big difference

This book covers an astonishingly wide range of accents and is packed full of information on vowel and consonant shifts and intonation patterns, but an accent cannot be learned from a book alone. This is where the CD had the potential to be incredibly helpful, but it is instead its biggest flaw.

The accents for the British Isles and Australia/New Zealand are, almost without exception awful. At best they are gross caricatures of the accents, at worst they are completely unidentifiable. To his credit he usually lists examples of films to see for examples of the accent, and this is indeed where I would suggest that people start. The accents that he performs are curiously stilted and exaggerated, and to me sound like an accent would sound if learnt from a book. I cannot authoratively comment on the North American accents as I have never lived there for any length of time, but to me even the American accents sounds stilted compared with what I hear in films and on TV. The foreign language accents are more debatable as so much depends on how the person in question has learnt English.

I'll give you an example - in the chapter on Australian accents he states that the A sound tends towards an I, so 'day' becomes 'die'. Whilst this is certainly an Australian tendency, it is a subtle shift, and the degree of this shift can only really be ascertained from listening to a native. Simply replacing 'day' with 'die' (as he does on the CD) makes you sound like a caricature. Everybody I've played the CD to has been in fits of laughter.

Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot of useful information in this book, but the CD is very dangerous if anybody thinks that they're hearing authentic accents.