Like every week we post a book review on a subject related to acting, health, personal growth or anything related to the showbiz industry. In this case its Robert Blumenfeld’s revised and expanded edition of “Accents: A manual for actors”.
It’s a great tool to give us actors and one that is so complete is hard to come along. The one-place to find it all.
The book includes:
-Asian Accents: Chinese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai, Indonesian….etc
-African Accents: South African, Zulu, Sub-Saharan, Ethiopian, Nigerian, Ugandan, Congo, Swahili…etc.
-Middle Eastern: Arabic Accents, Egyptian, Hebrew, Persian…etc
-Slavic Accents: Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Slovak, Czech, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian…
-Germanic Accents: German, Prussian, Bavarian, Viennese, Yiddish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish…etc
-Romance Accents: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian…etc.
But what is truly impressive is that it separates by class, Date, and geography the American, British Isles and Commonwealth English. So its not the same to study a Upper Class late 1900’s North American accent from Baltimore, and a Modern English Provincial Accent from Liverpool.
The book gives a detailed and comprehensive description but for those of us who prefer to learn in a more audio-visual form, it also includes 2 CD’s with a manual to each language.
So, Is it worth reading? If you’ve read the rest of the article you know already the answer is YES!!!!!! This book serves as a wonderful tool for any actor and is worth even having as a reference book because you will certainly find yourself returning to it time and time again throughout your career.
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