Tim Laubach
So you say tomahto, but you want to say tomayto? Tim Laubach is the owner of American English Workshop, which focuses on American English language and accent training. He tells Jayson Albano why potayto beats potahto.
HK Magazine: Why start an American accent class?
Tim Laubach: When I first arrived here I was teaching at a British school and they asked me to teach British English. I wasn’t very comfortable doing that. When I asked the children in the class which way they preferred and which way they wanted to learn, many of them said they really liked the way Americans said words: it was easier for them. I decided to open my own tutoring center based on that.
HK: What do you mean by “American accent”? There are loads!
TL: We usually shoot for American neutral, or American Northeast: places like New York, New England, Pennsylvania. Personally, I’m from Pennsylvania, and that accent is pervasive in the US, anywhere from Maryland all the way through to Maine.
HK: Can’t we just watch movies?
TL: People can watch movies, but many people watch American movies and they still don’t have American accents. When you watch a movie, you’ll hear the difference but you don’t know how to say the difference. So we train people on the mouth shapes that they need to have, and the vowel and consonant sounds that they need in order to speak with the correct accent.
HK: Why are people in Hong Kong switching from learning the UK accent to the American accent?
TL: I think it’s mainstream television and music, which is very heavily based on American culture. That gives people a pretty heavy motivation to learn the American accent. Prior to the handover it was always the BBC, but now you can get a lot more access to American shows, via the Internet or television.
HK: What do Hong Kong parents associate with the American accent?
TL: I don’t know: hamburgers? Hamburgers and fat people? I don’t know what they associate with the accent! Most parents think that the world is changing, and they think about Obama and American culture, and they want their kids to learn that. They’re looking at how the world will be in 10 or 20 years. On the other hand, children associate the accent with Disney.
HK: Why do lots of women swoon over men with British accents?
TL: I’m not a woman so I don’t know how to answer that! But I do know that the British accent is quite popular in American television as well, and many women I know really enjoy that accent. It could be because it’s more exotic and more difficult to find a man with a British accent in the US.