Introduction Accented

How many English accents are there in the world? Let me guess. you're thinking American, British, Australian, possibly South African. And what about grammar and vocabulary? Does it change each country you go to? Let me break down the numbers for you. There are 195 countries in the world, and 45 of those countries have at least half the population who can competently speak English. I bet you that is more than what you were originally thinking. Let me introduce myself: my name is Kimberly Law and I've created this podcast for people to continue learning English by being exposed to multiple accents in real life conversations. 
In each episode, I will interview an English speaker. And you will hear their story. The podcast title will list the country the guest is coming from so you can get an understanding of their accent. 
The reason I created this podcast is because I don't believe that there is enough real world conversations for ESL learners. Of course you have your ESL books where you can study grammar and then there might be an audio component with a conversation - they say, but it's not a real conversation. And I wanted English learners to actually hear real conversations and become familiar with them. 
In this podcast, I will be interviewing English native speakers and second-language speakers from all over the world who will explain their story. Now let's get back to those numbers I was talking about at the beginning. When you look at the world, 7.5 billion people, 527 million people are native English speakers. 
Now that isn't a lot of people when you compare it to native Chinese speakers, which equal 1.3 7 billion. So why is English the world's language? It is because 1.5 billion people are learning English. That is 20% of the world's population. Now when learning English, I've had students tell me they want to learn British English or they want to learn American English and only listen to accents from these countries. 
Now the UK has 65 million people with multiple accents. Take England, for example. If you live in Manchester, your accent is different to someone in London or Birmingham. Plus there are other countries in the UK like Scotland. Wales and Northern Ireland. Not one accent is the same. You'll probably find that it is more likely that you could be communicating with a second language speaker just like yourself. 
1.5 billion learners compared to 527 million native speakers plus the different accents across native speakers and learners. What is important for you is to understand a variety of English accents and the context of the conversation. I hope you enjoy the series and good luck with your English learning journey. 
I hope you enjoy the accented series and please don't hesitate to email me with any questions or visit my website, Kim's law of english.com our Facebook page, Instagram, or Twitter, new episodes of accented will be released on the 15th and the 30th of each month. Make sure you listen to the podcast episodes already available. 
See you next time. 
www.kimslawofenglish.com