My name is Madeline and I’m completing 3 months work experience at Cobb PR. I am originally from Germany. It’s been a month since I arrived in Eastbourne, so I thought I would blog about my first weeks with Cobb PR.
Eastbourne is lovely. That’s the first thing I’ve recognised. Everyone says lovely, some more than others, but I don’t go a day without hearing that word at least 10 times.
I love different languages, and I speak German, English and French, I’d love to speak Spanish and Italian. Due to my interest in languages, it’s really interesting listening to different accents and it’s come to my attention that the people in Eastbourne have a special way of pronouncing certain words and consonants.
The U’s seem to be stretched and connected to a W. That means that stupid becomes more like ‘stewpid’, or instead of ‘tune’, they’d rather say ‘tewn’. That’s similar with the suffixing. Americans would swallow it, but British people accentuate that ending. It seems that they pronounce the heavy consonants very clearly, therefore it’s really easy to understand British English.
In my opinion, the British accent is beautiful, it sounds really melodic to me.
Because we’re all creatures of habit, I thought I can get into the way of expressing myself a little bit more British. So every time I hear something typical British, I repeat it until I feel more British enunciating myself. Janet in the office is like a teacher to me helping me patiently improve my articulation.
Apart from the accent and the use of words, it never gets boring here in the office.
Everybody is friendly and polite and I don’t have to be afraid to ask anyone anything.
The atmosphere is great! It’s the perfect mixture of work and with some small talk in between.
But I think those small talks are obvious in the communication area. The PR industry is really interesting and I’m excited about what lies ahead!