# Understand that in most British accents speakers don't roll their R is(except those from the West Country, Scotland, Northumbria, Northern Ireland, and parts of Lancashire), but not all British accents are the same, ie: a Scottish accent varies greatly from an English accent.
#Don't attempt to learn more than one accent at a time. Since Estuary English sounds very different to a "Geordie" accent, you'll get confused very easily.
# Please pay attention to the tones and emphasis used throughout spoken sentences by the British. Do sentences generally end on a higher note, the same, or lower? How much variation is there in tone throughout a typical sentence? There is a huge variation between regions with tonality. British speech, especially RP, usually varies much less within a sentence than American English, and the general tendency is to go down slightly towards the end of a phrase. However, Liverpool and north-east England are notable exceptions!
# Pronounce ''U'' in ''stupid'' and in ''duty'' with the ''ew'' sound. Avoid the ''oo'' as in an American accent; thus it is pronounced ''stewpid'', not ''stoopid'', etc. In the standard English accent, the ''A'' (for example, in ''father'') is pronounced at the back of the mouth with an open throat - it sounds like "Arh". This is the case in pretty much all British accents, but it's exaggerated in RP. In southern England and in RP, words such as "bath", "path", "glass", "grass" also use this vowel. However, in other parts of Britain "bath", "path", etc. sound like "ah"
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# Get a British person to say well known sentences: "How now brown cow" and "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain" and pay close attention. Rounded mouth vowels in words such as "about" in London, are usually flattened in Northern Ireland.
# Notice that two or more vowels together may prompt an extra syllable. For example, the word "road" would usually be pronounced ''rohd'', but in Wales and with some people in Northern Ireland it might be pronounced ''ro.ord''.
# Enunciate on heavy consonant words. Pronounce that ''T'' in "duty" as ''T'': not as the American ''D'' as ''doody'' so that duty is pronounced ''dewty'' or a softer ''jooty''. Pronounce the suffix ''-ing'' with the ''G''. This way it sounds like ''-ing'' rather than ''-een''. But sometimes it is shortened to ''in'' as in ''lookin''.
#* The words ''human being'' are pronounced ''hewman being'' or ''yooman been'' in certain areas, though it could be pronounced ''hewman bee-in''.
# Drop the ''T''s. With some accents, ''T''s aren't pronounced at all, especially in words with two ''T''s grouped together. So battle might be pronounced ''Ba-ill'', catching the air behind the back of the tongue at the end of the first syllable before expelling it on pronunciation of the second syllable. This is known as the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop glottal stop].
#* People with Estuary English, RP, Scottish, Irish and Welsh accents do consider it lazy and rude to drop the ''T''s, and this feature doesn't exist, but in almost all accents it's accepted to do it in the middle of words in casual contexts and almost universal to put a glottal stop at the end of a word.)
#* Addition from an American theatre specialist: Americans do glottal stops all the time,"bu-on" for button, "mou--ian" for mountain). However, it is considered by Brits that people with chav or Cockney accents do glottal stops.
# Observe that ''H'' is always pronounced. The "H" is pronounced in the word "herb," in contrast to American ''erb''.
# Realize that some words require the ''ee'' sound to be pronounced as in the word ''been''. In an American accent, this is often pronounced ''bin''. In an English accent, ''been'' is the more common pronunciation, but "bin" is sometimes heard in casual speech where the word isn't particularly stressed.
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