Couch potayto, couch potahto.
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You have to couch it in terms they understand.
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I smelled the awesomeness going on there.
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Better to get them from a dialect couch than, say, a casting couch.
(If anyone needs to google it, don’t do it at work)
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like I said…I have learned MANY things from couches. 
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She characterizes it in nearly those terms.
Separately, i wasn’t feeling her German accent, but can’t make concrete in my head what it is that’s off.
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FIXED HEADLINE IS NOT ACTUALLY A FIX! IS NOW NOT AMUSING, CHANGE IT BACK!
Seriously, “Dialect couch” is the best.
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Davenport Spud.
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All her continental European accents sounded alike to me. The German accent sounds nothing like a German accent. The Russian accent only occasionally sounded Russian.
I wasn’t even feeling the Midwest accent, and I’m a native Midwesterner. I think she was trying to do a generic Midwestern accent. Not Upper Midwest, Great Lakes, Inland, Midland, etc., but generic Midwestern, which doesn’t actually exist. It’s an acquired fake accent used by actors, not to be confused with General American, another fake accent that real people use.
I was feeling forgiving with the Midwestern accent as it’s hard to “do” your actual accent.
I like the musical accompaniment there - funny
Didn’t she say the Midwestern one was her native accent?
Yes, and it’s still not correct.
True.
German accent: Another American who watched too many Nazi movies. Germans don’t talk that way. Even Hitler was mocked for his clipped way of speaking for as long as it was still legal. This is just toxic stereotyping.
French accent: She manages pronouncing a French “r”. She does not imitate French intonation or stress patterns. And switching from French intonation/stress patterns to English or German stress patterns is what takes language learners the longest. Definitely a lot longer than it will take them to figure out that the word “French” is not prounced /fʁɑ̃ʃ/ after all, but rather /fɹɛnt͡ʃ/.
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In general, I’m always annoyed when “foreign accents” are lumped in with the “native accents”.
Whether you speak English with a Texan accent or with a Scottish accent, that can be an important part of your identity, and taken together, it adds some enjoyable diversity to the English language (it does earn the language some curses from language learners, though). A person from Scotland can proudly speak English the way they speak English at home without having anyone tell them that it’s “wrong”.
But the fact that I speak English with a slight Austrian German accent is not part of my identity. It is not the way we speak English at home, because we don’t speak English at home. It is just the mistakes that one is more likely to make when one’s primary language is Austrian German. Every little detail where I don’t have an Austrian German accent is an achievement that I’m proud of.
When you imitate a foreign accent, know that you’re not respectfully emulating an expression of somebody’s cultural identity. You’re imitating their mistakes that they can’t avoid making despite having invested a significant amount of work into your language. Be careful about it. Now, over here in Europe, we’re all grown-up nations, we can take a little friendly mockery and even enjoy it. But just don’t pass it off as “respecting the diverse ways that English is spoken around the world”.
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These are like the accents used by actors, rather than the accent someone from XYZ part of the world uses.
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Not sure I get your point. Actors try to imitate accents that actually exist, don’t they?
Not really. The transatlantic accent doesn’t really exist, certainly not anymore. The Generic American accent is an acquired accent, but people use it. The Generic Midwestern accent in the video doesn’t really exist, but is close-ish to parts of Kansas/Iowa/Nebraska. It’s an attempt to create a Midwestern accent that doesn’t sound too northern or urban. Also, the Brooklyn and London accents are more like approximations than the real thing. The European accents are just bad.
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Yep, the German accent is a bit off, sort of generic… But then, German has a lot of accents itself.
(This one time in Munich I had to switch to using English in order to be able to converse with one of the locals, his Bavarian accent was so heavy, I couldn’t make heads nor tails of what he was saying. The punchline here is that I am German. But not from anywhere near Bavaria.)
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