British or American? Which is best? It depends on where you are living, and if you want to sound like those around you, or be different. Sometimes it’s nice to distinguish yourselves from those around you, but often, when you move to a new country, and your accent leads to misunderstanding, or you aren’t able to understand what others are saying, it’s time to try to minimize it.

I taught an “Accent Reduction” at my local community college (evening classes) for a few years, and it was so interesting to me to see what my students had issues with in speaking American English.

Most of it comes from a few pronunciation and spelling differences, and here are a few easy ones to see – 

In the stressed part of the word –
–/A dult/ (UK) and /a DULT/ (US)
Words ending in -ILE –
–Mobile = /MO byle/ (UK) and /MO bil/ (US)
The sound of A in some words –
–Bath = /Baath/ (short o – UK) and /Bath/ (short a – US) 
The sound of R in some words –
–Hard = /Haad/ (no R – UK) and /HaRd/ (strong R – US)
The -ization ending –
–Civilization = /Civ i lize A tion (UK) and Ci vi liz-A tion (US)
And of course, the T sound in the middle –
–Better = Be Ta (UK) and Be DeR (US).

There are many videos online these days about the differences between American & British pronunciation. I like Gabby with GoNaturalEnglish for her videos with Anna – here’s one that is informative & funny at the same time 🙂 I got some of the examples above from this video –
https://youtu.be/84vxOlMtGQw

If you want to know more, or have a question, put a comment below and I will answer your question! 🙂