American accent tips?

Question:any american accent tips?
i have an audition and i need to be able to sound a little bit american!
i am australian , but i have a really light accent... not a full on "G'day Mate" sorta one lol.

help me...... =]

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: any american accent tips?
i have an audition and i need to be able to sound a little bit american!
i am australian , but i have a really light accent... not a full on "G'day Mate" sorta one lol.

help me...... =]

OK.

First--what kind of American? There are three broad types of American dialect (general, Southern, New England) and then there are some recognizable subtypes (Brooklyn, Valley, Boston, Minnesota, various southern types like Georgia, Tennesee-Kentucky, Central S. Carolina...).

If you're going for the general American dialect (the most typical one, the one that TV announcers are expected to display) then some of the characteristics are:

1) relatively flat--not much range in pitch.
2) middle-of-mouth tone--not nasal, not throaty, not chesty.
3) lots of "schwa" vowels--leading to a rather clipped delivery.
4) Most consonants are enunciated cleanly (but not extremely crisply), but medial 't' is rendered 'd' (budder, not butter; liddle, not little).
5) When pausing, fill the pause with "uh".
6) Younger females will talk somewhat faster and will tend toward an upward inflection at the end of sentences, which makes every utterance sound like a question?

Try to talk like you are demanding something. Talk like a robot but not fully. but smoothly.

I know this may sound funny, but you may want to check out some newscast clips from the United States' Midwest markets.

Living in Minneapolis, I know that our market is often raided by larger coastal cities for anchor talent because of our lack of decipherable accents.

Hope this helps!

keep watching american movies and repeat EVERYTHING each character says!!! that way, you'll naturally accustom yourself to the american accent. after about a week you should be pretty good if you kept at it.

some advice: dont watch movies like rush hour or other movies that have alotta foreigners in them since they have other accents.

I suggest:
dumb and dumber(comedy)
joe dirt(comedy and hilarious!)
wedding crashers(comedy)
superbad(comedy)
transformers(action)
and of the spidermans except the one with the chinese violin lady(action/comedy)

good luck!

If you want a new yorker you cut all the words short
ie- 'New Yorker' would be said "neu your-kerr" and with a little bit of grit in the voice, rough.
good luck!

Well its a little difficult to notice my own accent, not to mention there are a lot of different accents within american english, but I would think the best thing to do would probably be to watch some movies with american actors and try to study and mimic that.
Good luck!

What is the role? A character from the Deep South? A person from Boston? Or New York City? All completely different sounds.

Nicole Kidman is a good example of an Australian actress who is able to soften her dialect to a general American sound. You might try checking out a few of her films.

If you have time, you can find dialect tapes specific to the regional sound you need to emulate. Try the Samuel French website or public library.

When I am working with a dialect, I mark the vowel sound changes in my script to give me a visual reminder. Practicing with tape recorder is a good auditory tool.

While I agree with alot of what some people are saying in regards to your question I would say that the one piece of advice I can give is practice. I've been doing accents since I was three when I first watched an episode of Dr. Who and talked like the good doc for days. Listen, hear the small differences in the way words are said, watch American films and practice. One thing I have noticed is we American hardly ever fully enunciate words, and we talk too fast. Good Luck!