I want to talk about English and American English

[JashMorrow]

Which one is better?

[Happytofita]

Hello,

British vs. American English

British vs. American English (2)

British vs. American English (3)

[JashMorrow]

British vs. American English

[Jamie (K)]

Neither one is better or worse. Only foreign teachers and students of English care about it. Native English speakers don't care, and half the time they don't pay any attention to who speaks which variety.

Besides, which kind of British English are you talking about? Only about 3 percent of the people in England (just in England!) speak the type of English that you will hear in British ESL recordings (BBC English, or whatever you want to call it). This means that only 1.5 million people speak that way. England has 51 million, and the whole UK has 62 million. If you add up the populations of the main countries where English is spoken as a native language, the total is something like 121 million. That means that only about 1% of the native English speakers in the world use what you would probably think of as "British" English. The number of native speakers of "General American" is much larger than the population of the whole United Kingdom.

Besides, the British have many dialects, and they vary so much that often the British can't understand each other.

It makes no sense to be familiar with only one variety of English.