LOL I remember the soap operas in Britain. They are superior to American soap operas in every way. "Days of Our Lives" and "All My Children" are boring stories about glamorous idiots, and I never got into them. But the soap operas in Australia and Britain are about everyday people who aren't especially glamorous or even good-looking. "Home and Away", "Eastenders", and one that was set in a Welsh village were my favorites. I remember Patsy Palmer crying her eyes out on "Eastenders", blubbering and messing up her make-up and being generally incoherant, while wearing a crummy halter top. You'd never see that in an American soap opera.

But I digress. It took me a while to differentiate between British regional accents--I could tell if someone was English, Scottish, or Irish, but that was it. After a while I became aware of London, Cornwall, and so on. I dunno if I still could. And I can understand how some American accents can be grating, like a certain NYC accent and a Texas accent. Not that all people with that accent sound bad, just when coupled with a certain voice quality.

I worked at a fruit and veg store in Reislip. Sometimes when I got really bored, I would speak in more of a hillbilly accent. They probably thought I was nuts, but it fun to say "You wan' sum a' dem taters back der?" Most of the people in Reislip spoke very proper English with what my British friend called a "posh" accent. And is it true that there is a class difference between those who say "ta" and those who say "cheers"?

Once I had dinner with a chef from my workplace in Memphis. I listened to his accent, trying to place him. I finally asked him, "What part of Britain are you from?" and he answered "Actually, I'm from Melbourne." D'Oh! He hadn't sounded Australian at all.

--Jez"likes to learn about how others speak, because her own dialect is so bland"zika