As much as I find speaking English on a regular basis for a few years now both a miracle and an ordeal (it varies from day to day, which one is more dominant: usually it’s also torturously bittersweet, because you are permanently “that loser” or “this bilingual with a pesky accent,” and it’s a bit overwhelming), I always try to find a way to improve it (of course!) in one way or another. We all understand that for academics, and especially those of us who have found themselves (somewhat inevitably) in the broad field of arts and humanities, using language properly is essential. So there: reading, writing, reading again and repeat. But not only: there is also YouTube, of course, which gives you an endless number of opportunities to check your level and to learn something new.
As people from my closest milieu have already known, I am obsessed with regional accents and peculiarities of pronunciation in British English, which is ironic enough, because I cannot reproduce any of them due to my own, strong (and stable, LOL) Slavic accent. But I digress: I still love to surf through the manuals of linguistic tutorials of different sorts, from the strictly academic to the purely entertaining, and it’s lovely.
Not long ago I came across one of the most popular YouTube channels, where its creator (or shall I say YouTube influencer? I don’t know anymore), a young and attractive woman in her middle twenties, does exactly that: teaches her audience how to speak proper British English* (mostly RP, but sometimes she also gives glimpses of how the regional Southern/Northern accents sound in the UK). So, what is the catch? The catch is that she is one of the most unpleasant, obnoxious and entitled personalities I’ve ever seen on this platform (and mind you: I’ve seen quite a few of them—the MUA/beauty community is a vivid example). But this girl always gives you that idea of the “high-school pretty bully” trope from teen dramas, which is, quite frankly, not a thing you would expect to reflect on while learning modal verbs.
Long story short: I gave up listening to her channel almost immediately, and—what a coincidence—found her interview in one of the popular tabloids where she said that, frankly, teachers are the most unnecessary and over-hyped profession and if everyone had at least a bit of brain, they could learn everything from manuals. Such as her own.
No darling, thank you very much, but I give you a miss.
But then I found another channel, and I think that it was one of the best recent discoveries by far: it’s dedicated to Old English and its transformations and was launched by a young student from UCLan (kudos to Lancashire! And yet another proof that a former polytechnic could transform into an excellent uni), whose main subject is Archaeology and Historical Linguistics (more specifically, comparative reconstruction). As far as I know, he gained a fair few subscribers after his videos, where he impersonates a young Anglo-Saxon lad living in a cabin in the woods, went viral (sorry for a disturbing clichè). People on Reddit noticed him first, and then I’ve seen links to his videos elsewhere.
His name is Simon Roper, and his channel is truly great: it consists of somewhat slow and meditative video sessions, talking about Proto-Indo-European Lyringeal Theory, Ferdinand de Saussure and his “Cours de linguistique générale” and such, with quirky shots of amphibians (presumably from his garden). At first I listened to him once per week, but now I come back to his channel quite regularly: not only he is sharing lots of solid academic material, but also he’s doing it in a very friendly, calm and eccentric manner.
TL;DR: highly recommended, if you need some smart yet a bit weird food for your brain. The link on his channel is in the first comment down below.
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* I skipped the name of her channel on purpose, because I don’t want her to gain even a few subscribers or views. But you can google her pretty easily: she is still one of the most successful language tutors out there.
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