Rating: 
Summary: Some Problems, but Generally an Effective Learning Tool
Review: You will not learn an accent from this book. Let's start with that for a statement of fact.An accent is integrated with the way a person speaks his or her native language. The way a person holds his or her mouth while speaking. This pattern is learned by imitating the sounds of speech a person hears every day between the ages of nine months and three years. To learn an accent, you must master the way the jaw, soft palette, nasal cavity, and tongue are held in speaking with certain accents. That said, you could actually learn how to hold your mouth for an accent by imitating sounds, just like a baby does. It takes more willful effort and study as an adult, but it can be done. And this book will give you the sounds to imitate and the structure to assume. Vocal coach Robert Blumenfeld eschews the lengthy dialect monologues that are usually preferred in textbooks like this one, in favor of practice words and sentences that allow you as speaker to familiarize yourself with the structure of your vocal apparatus. Simple hard work and repetition is the key to achieving any accent accurately, and this book, with accompanying CD, is a good way to go about it. Not everyone will find this book equally useful. Women, for example, will find this book more difficult to work with than men. Though the printed contents are just as useful for women as for men, the audio portion may not be. Blumenfeld presents himself speaking in the accents he's trying to convey. Women will not find it impossible to learn an accent by imitating him, but they will have a harder time creating a more feminine-sounding variant of the accent in question. This is especially true where it comes to certain Khosian accents and the native accents of East and Southeast Asia, where men and women vocalize differently, and accents are inflected according to gender. Likewise, those interested in accents other than Euro-American will be at a loss. These accents are treated very stintingly, and are sometimes lumped together in a broad, unfair manner, as the accents of Africa are. However, it is a simple fact that these accents are less in demand, theatrically, than Euro-American accents, so there's less call to spend precious CD time and print space on them. You may take my experience as representative, moreover, when I tell you that Blumenfeld's book can help you learn accents, but familiarity with this book does not make you a qualified dialect coach. As it turns out, that job is actually profoundly complex, and just because you are able to speak with an accent does not mean you are able to teach it to anyone else. Your best bet is simply to place this book in somebody's hands when they have plenty of time to practice, and wish them the best of luck. Despite these problems, this book remains a fair and valuable introduction to accents. Its structure, though it won't work for everybody, will help most people most of the time in getting the hang of the accent they desire to emulate. Just remember, the most important part of learning a new accent is not memorizing and imitating sounds, but holding your mouth correctly, and this book's method will teach that to you if you're willing to learn.
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