(no subject)

[jaala]

I'm about to upload a couple entries I wrote when I was pissed off but did have anybody to rant at. Their tone is not really all that reflective of my experience in England which, on balance, was good.

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After not daring to even glance at it for the past week for fear I wouldn't get anything else done while attempting to "catch up", I think I can start reading my Friends page again. Catching up after several months when I didn't have time is out of the question though.

Did I miss anything juicy?

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Today, I rode a bicycle on the right-hand side of the road for the first time in months. I kept looking in the wrong places for street signs as well. It felt weird, just like getting used to hearing Canadian accents all the time took me several days. At the beginning of the plane ride, the pilot's accent was jarring, but by the time I arrived in Toronto it sounded a bit more normal. (British television and radio still sounds much less foreign than before the trip though.) I am now finally getting used to the fact that people will understand me without the need to over-enunciate...

And I've finally stopped unconsciously preparing myself to hear and decode different dialects. I did find that under certain circumstances, i.e. with a stranger who wouldn't be bracing themselves for a Canadian accent, with someone who had a fairly "mainstream" RP type accent, I would pick up certain aspects of his/her speech and usually end up with something faintly mid-Atlantic. It sometimes made it easier to be understood and, well, sometimes it also just felt like something I ought to do.

Much to my family's disappointment, there was no recognizable change in my accent when I arrived home; but I think that's because I encountered so many different dialects that there was no consistent standard for me to imitate. If my accent started to drift while talking to someone with a more pronounced regional dialect, I tended to mix up sounds from different dialects/accents and confuse the hell out of anyone who was listening. (I didn't even bother while in Yorkshire, for instance.) And, of course, even if drifting into bowdlerised mid-Atlantic/RP, I would quite frequently encountered a sound I couldn't do and revert back to Canadian.

Now I have to get used to mentally auto-correcting Canadian terms (e.g. cell phone, French fries). By the way, I highly amused my dad by referring to someone as a "tosser" a couple days ago.

Any guesses what my feelings are on taking a Phonetics course this year? (Whee!)