I'm teaching someone how to talk in the Received Pronunciation. Advice?

Question

My friend wants to learn the Received Pronunciation (RP), for her own reasons. (Please don't give me answers asking why, or telling me that she shouldn't do this etc. Please. She is serious and has good reasons.)

Since I can speak three accents very well, one of them being the RP, I have sketched out these strategies to make her learn:

- I gave her some rules such as: words like "caught" and "ought" have an extended "o" sound. Also, the mouth never opens wide; the word "also" is pronounced as "oolsow".

- She watches at least 2 hours of BBC everyday. I make sure it's a show or a news report in the RP.

- She reads out to me, if I am at her house. I correct her mistakes.

- If I'm not there, she reads out to herself everyday, making notes if necessary.

Anything else I can do? Or she can do? Some free audio tools or software available? She cannot spend much money on this. So, if she has to buy any audio tools, software or books, the prices have to be reasonable.

Answer 1

its easy to learn received pronunciation without lessons if your friend wants to learn received pronunciation watch BBC news 24 RP English is very easy to learn without lessons unless your not English

Answer 2

You've got the trick about not opening the mouth wide - when exaggerating the accent, comedians and actors keep their teeth clenched completely.

Then there's the bit about dropping the 'r' sound from words like car/far/Gloucester. Whilst sometimes adding an 'r' sound to words that end with a vowel, like area.

Don't forget the long 'ah' sound in bath/grass/castle etc.

Don't drop the 'h' from herb/head/half etc.

There is a subtle difference to how tune/noon/dune are pronounced, especially compared to Americans. It's like RP speakers stick a 'y' in front of the 'oo' sound (tyune vs toon).

Instead of watching TV, I'd recommend listening to the radio (old fashioned stations like Radio 4 and the World Service which have a lot of talking and little music).

It's not just how the words are pronounced, but how sentences are constructed as well, so how about reading some old classic novels by the likes of Waugh or watching most anything adapted by Merchant & Ivory?

Finally, there will be plenty of resources on the web which will turn up primers, audio samples, etc.