I’ll never forget one of my coworkers asking me what my first language was because, “I speak English as a second language I know what it sounds like, so what’s your first language?”
My first language is English, I just speak it really poorly
Could also be that they mistook your regional accent for the accent one has when learning it as a secondary language.
Does that really make it better?
Well, you did forget the period on your sentence… But, I won’t tell the teacher!
My wife and I were stationed in Germany for a couple years with the US military. Her only experience with a foreign language was some classes in French in high school, which came in useful since we were stationed near the French border. But while we were living in Germany, we decided to learn some German so we could get around easier.
We took a trip up to Berlin one week and my wife was trying her best to speak to a vendor in German, but she was really struggling. The vendor decided to switch to French instead. Apparently, her German had a heavy French accent, since that was the only other foreign language she had practiced. She was able to finish the conversation in French.
While backpacking in Europe I spent a week in France. I got in the habit of starting conversations with “parlez-vous anglais?”
Next stop was Germany. After getting off an early train and trying to book the next leg, I asked the ticket attendant, “sprechen sie anglais?” She stared at me for a moment and responded in crystal clear English, “You mean, do I speak English?”
That’s the type of thing that no one but me would remember, but it would keep me up at night for yeeeeeears.
You know those things people tell you “no one remembers that but you, so just relax”?
Well, I had a worst case experience where I was speaking to an acquaintance who said “haha remember when you [insert soul crushing embarrassing thing I did 6 years ago that only I am supposed to remember] ?”
That did, in fact, not help against my anxiety whatsoever.
That’s serious nightmare fuel. I’m so sorry. RIP your sanity. 🙏
Oh god, and Germans mostly won’t even pretend they don’t think you’re dumb. Americans would be like, “oh, no I totally get it (insert story about a time they did something similar), you’re fine!” Germans will say, “yes, I speak English” and stare at you while waiting for you to get to the point as you wish you could become one with the pavement.
We Americans love our anecdotes
We just like talking about ourselves
Por que no los dos? 🤷
I work in an office that takes passport applications, so I see people from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds, and I can tell you we’re definitely not the only ones. Lots of people love an opportunity to tell you a story if you give them an opening. Honestly, I love it. I don’t do that job anymore, but that was my favorite part of it. It’s such a nice way to form a shared connection, even if it’s only for a few minutes.
For anyone like me who doesn’t speak German, and thus were unable to follow the implied humiliation: the German word for English is “Englisch” not “Anglais”
I always wonder what mixes of languages other than american english sound like. Like, i know what a french guy speaking english sounds like, and I know what a german guy sounds like speaking english sounds like… but I wonder what a german guy speaking french sounds like? Or spanish, or chinese?
Spanish is my second language, and while I know I speak with an accent (try my best to sound andaluz, but there’s no hiding the kiwi sometimes), I can recognise some accents - Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Sevilla, Granada, Madrid are some distinct ones I’m familiar with, hearing non-natives speak fluently with a slight foreign accent, or hearing someone you know as an English speaker break out excellent Spanish is wild. I worked with a Lithuanian woman once who spoke fluent Spanish but kept her Lithuanian accent, even down to the way she would punctuate her sentences, she was terrifying in 3 (or more) languages.
I’m trying to learn Spanish, I understood almost everything Gwyneth said, and almost nothing the interviewer said. Not sure if it’s word selection, but non natives always deliberately fully pronounce each word which makes it so much easier to hear.
Yeah Gwyneth does speak very clearly and slower than a native in this interview, although fluently and with a Madrid/Toledo accent. You’ll get there with the interviewer and natural native speakers in general, it’s just about regular exposure to the speed and omissions.
The main features of the accents are very similar, I believe. I’m Brazilian, and one of my friends has been living in Belgium for a couple of years now. She’s starting to speak Portuguese with a French accent now, it’s very funny. Last time she was here, some street vendor even mentioned that she speaks very good Portuguese for a foreigner.
I did some digging:
German accent in French (has German mixed in at times, sorry): https://youtu.be/j8mwxLoBWhE
For completeness: a French accent in German: https://youtu.be/HrkXPr1DiRw
A German speaking Spanish (I assume with an accent) (the female voice) https://youtu.be/yIoXoEeg6AM?t=359
I’m having trouble finding a video of a German speaking Chinese with an accent. I found this, but i don’t get the feeling that his accent is too strong: https://youtu.be/OlAsL3Cd-yc
Thank you for all of this! The first one (german accent speaking french) sounds exactly like i’d expect actually. However the opposite is harder for me to tell what language he’s even speaking at times (he seems to go back and forth? I heard a “tres bien” in there).
The woman speaking Spanish just kind of sounded like an american lady speaking spanish to me 🤷♂️ she could just be better at suppressing her native accent though.
That’s one advantage of being German. You do just hear it when a German speaks English.
A few weeks ago, we had a meeting at work and it was like 20 Germans, but one guy greeted in English, so I guess, this meeting is gonna be in English then. And like, us Germans were all doing extremely fine, but it was still just absolutely fucking comical when the native English speaker responded. In comparison, we all just sounded like shitty robots.
German natives speaking English usually makes for one of my favourite accents, it’s very pleasant.
I love Germans for a million reasons. there’s nothing I don’t like about them. Particularly impressive that most of them speak five languages fluently.
That’s not Germans, that’s Luxemburgers. Many Germans speak English, some will speak the neighbouring country’s language close to the border, but not 5 languages.
Going to a McDonald’s in Luxembourg it was quite amusing to see one person take on 4 orders in 4 different languages back to back. (English, Dutch, German and French)
On another note while most Luxemburgers will speak 4 or more languages, most people I spoke to wouldn’t respond if you didn’t speak the language they find “native” to their area. Until you then start speaking another one of the languages and they understand you’re just a tourist trying to speak one of their languages.
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Well I am German living in Germany and I can assure you that is not really the case for 95% of Germans
Yeah, I think you are confusing the German with the Dutch. (Which happens a lot…)
Dutch generally speak several languages. Germans in general speak only German and rudimentary English (if you’re lucky).
(A common Dutch gripe with visiting German tourists is that Germans just assume the Dutch speak German (which they mostly do, so okay, they’ve got a point, but still) and just start speaking German without asking first)
In my experience living in The Netherlands, that’s usually Dutch, English and German, but strangelly not French (or at least nowhere as good as the other ones).
That said it’s the place were I’ve met the most natives who could actually speak some more unusual to learn language (like Portuguese, Japanese, Mandarin and so on) - from my sample (and I lived and worked there almost a decade) the average Dutch person doesn’t know that many languages but there are a lot of Dutch people (more than what I’ve noticed in other countries) with a real interest in learning languages beyond what they’re taught at school, just for fun rather than out of need.
Being Dutch learning more languages is actually somewhat of a necessity since everyone around us expects us to speak them somewhat at least.
My favorite original English accent (or English-to-English, so to speak, as you say with German-to-English) is the Jamaican accent. Some reggae shows on the radio, I tune in as much for the DJ’s voice as for the music.
Go listen to Linton Kwesi Johnson narrating the history of reggae in a BBC Sounds documentary, to see what I mean. What a voice, my god, it goes down like dark honey, a thing of beauty.
It goes both ways - when I speak German I have an obvious English-speaker accent and many Germans will just answer me in English 😄
The past few years I’ve desperately tried to not sound as German. Now I have a weird Britishish accent and I’m kind of sad I don’t sound German anymore. But then again I work with Luxemburgish people (and other internationals so we often speak english) sound more German than Germans and it can be hard to keep a straight face at times.
Went to a pub in Iceland. English brother-in-law had been living there a while, trying to learn some basic Icelandic.
He orders the drinks, slowly, trying to remember the words as he goes. Finishes the order. Looks at the barman.
“Sorry mate, I dunno what you’re saying”, he replies in an Australian accent.
Buying beer from a man in Iceland
He was six-foot-four and full of muscle
I said, “Do you speak-a my language?”
And he just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich
Sometimes I can’t think of a word, so I give a terrible definition of the word I am looking for and my saddest face in the hopes that the person I’m talking to will take pity on my feeble mind.
Sometimes that can work though! I was in France once and had to try to talk about toes for some reason, I could only say “what do you call like, fingers but on your feet?” and they were like “…yes that’s right” (doigts de pied) while giving me a look like “duh, what kind of stupid language doesn’t call them foot-fingers.”
To be fair most of my interactions in English also fit in the ‘take pity on my feeble mind’ category, but I think either you learn something, or worst case scenario you give someone their own version of the ‘cobra chicken’ story to tell people, so you might as well go for it.
In German gloves are hand shoes (Handschuhe). I just though you should know.
Cobra chicken?
I’ve said exactly the same thing. My mind just went automatically and said “foot-fingers” and it was the friend I was talking with that interrupts me saying “you mean toes!?” and couldn’t stop laughing
Just to add that ‘doigts de pied’ is ok, but there is a specific word in French too (‘orteils’)
The word you’re looking for is Schadenfreude
I only speak English. I have this issue all the time.
I sometimes forget the word in English and German. Thanks brain, now I can’t even use a translator to remind me, since you decided to forget a word in my mother tongue.
Worst of all, when that happens my brain also refuses to offer - or accept - an alternative formulation. “No, you were looking for one specific word and you won’t continue until you find it!”
hey I got a story like that. I was in japan. my japanese was alright, I had attended two intensive courses before that, so I got around. But obviously i’m not japanese and everyone heard and saw that. I sat in a small eatery and ordered some Gyoza. This guy in a business suit next to me was all excited in japanese “oh you like Gyoza! how do you know about it?” and we started talking a bit, where he asked where I was from. I said that I’m from germany, where he immediately switched and we talked in German… weird experience.
I grew up in a fully bilingual home, in northwest Mexico. Then I was a foreign exchange student in Virginia, so my accent picked up a hint of southern twang.
So English is my second language, give me a minute of talking in it, and I’ll start thinking in it, without the need of translating it in my mind. People tell me they can’t place the accent… somewhere from Scandinavia, perhaps? French, maybe?
Someone once asked me if I grew up an army brat in Japan, and picked up some of the accent that develops in the communities around those bases, which is a fascinating concept.Another friend, who’s seen me go off in both Spanish and English, switching back and forth between people, told me that I have two personalities, and they’re tied to the language, and they are like musical notes that go together.
EDIT: Now that I remember, what my friend said was “it’s like you have two souls”.
I think it was fortunate to have been enveloped by two languages so early on. Learning academically is important, but it’ll only get you so far, the rest of the way requires that you be exposed to it, both passively and actively.
When I grew up, local cable had only stations from San Diego, if you wanted to watch cartoons, it would have to be in English.
You want motivation? I’ll show you motivation: You learn English, and your reward is Bugs Bunny and Saturday morning cartoons. Every single one of my friends growing up spoke English and Spanish.Less than a decade later, Mexican cable and satellite came into town. The English-speaking channels from San Diego got drowned out among a tsunami of new choices… and a huge motivation to learn English disappeared virtually overnight.
It looks to me like the type of environmental random experiment that pops up, like a Darwinian mechanism. Like growing a sharper beak to crack the nut. Then just as quickly as it popped up, it disappeared again, although an echo was left.
I live in Florida, and worked as a cashier for quite awhile when younger. There are these old ladies here, they will be walking around the store, talking in Spanish to each other, but at the checkout, switch to English with the most genteel old-timey Southern accent I have ever heard. It was always ladies.
Same on that two personalities bit, its weird. I feel like a lot of it comes from little me using English to express themselves more naturally since my family couldn’t understand it. Like, my standards for formal and casual speak in English and Spanish are so different, my speaking styles are not similar at all.
Same, I’m pretty much two different people
Wish I could speak another language besides high school Spanish
I like to imagine that’s your only language. Not even a first language, only high school spanish
“I can’t do shit but I can always find a bathroom or library”
Me llama T-Bone, la araña discoteca
Gods, high school spanish is so fucking useless in the real world.
I took four years of that shit, and couldn’t carry on a conversation. I learned more from my Mexican girlfriend in six months (and still suck at Spanish, unless I’m cursing, but still).
If you’re teaching a bunch of gringos Spanish, conjugating verbs instead of building vocabulary and actually speaking with the language is what matters. Do I give a fuck if some Guatemalan asks me where the bus stop is by saying “where bus to be”? No, because I can fucking parse that by virtue of being fluent in English.
But not even knowing how to say what the fuck it is you need to find after 4 years of the classes? Jfc.
Ugh. Just fuck high school language classes.
Well, learning other languages apparently makes your brain more flexible, but I share your frustration about how they’re formally taught in highschool, at least versus the much more interesting ways of learning languages which are living amongst the natives or “absorbing” a language from hearing it on TV because you already know a similar language.
I remember being taught Dutch formally when I moved to the Netherlands and almost none of it stuck, but some years later I ended up working for a small company were everybody but me was Dutch and they would just have all the meetings in Dutch (not with a bad intention, IMHO - always thought it was partly to help me learn it) and a mere 3 months later my Dutch was pretty decent. Being thrown in at the deep end is stressing but you learn fast and it’s never boring.
Ha. My Spanish is the opposite, I can name everything around me but can’t talk. Was in a sub shop in Miami once and the sandwich maker didn’t speak English, I didn’t even KNOW I knew the words for all those foods but quickly rattled off Mayonesa, Queso, Lechuga, Cebolla, Acetunas, Pimientos - everything I looked at I thought the Spanish word not the English word, it was all there in my head, what the fuck? But try to say I did something, instead of im doing something or going to do something? Total blank, I have to really think on it like it’s a puzzle.
This happens to me pretty frequently.
I think is alright, language is a bridge and sometimes we feel more comfortable speaking our native language than others. But I don’t really mind speaking in English or Spanish with people I meet in Brazil. But the moment of realization that you are talking with another native speaker is always full of joy.
#feels-nice to speak with other bilingual or polyglots :)
It’s hard for Brazilians to speak Spanish? Whenever I heard someone speak Brazilianese I feel like I’m having a stroke because like 25% of it is just spanish, but the rest is like French Spanish.
Lol @ Brazilianese. Language is Portuguese. Or sometimes Brazilian Portuguese. It always sounds Russian meets Spanish to me.
I like saying Brazilianese cuz it makes everyone angry
Absolute chad.
I can see why people think European Portuguese sounds Russian but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone say the same about Brazilian Portuguese.
I don’t think that these people heard much Russian, there’s literally nothing similar. You could say it’s sounds like Spanish, maybe Dutch or Greek even but Russian?
I’m from eastern Europe. Portuguese definitely has a slavic sound to it.
When I lived in The Netherlands and spoke Portuguese (with an accent from Portugal) on the phone, sometimes people asked me “What Eastern European language is that?”.
Of course that confusion only ever arises for people who are not familiar with neither Portuguese nor Slavic languages.
That said, Portuguese with a Brasilian accent totally doesn’t sound like some undefined EE language, since consonants aren’t spoken anywhere as hard as with a Portuguese accent.
Brazilian portuguese has all the phonems spanish has, but not the other way around. half of the words have same root so brazilians understand spanish for the most part and can infer meaning.
the other way around is tougher, because what might be a “hard t” becomes a “soft t” in portuguese, a “e” sound like “i” on certain words, etc. So spanish speakers get really confused.
Just being aware of these differences can remove those “blockers” and make spanish speakers understand brazilian portuguese much more easily (since, as said before, the root of many words is the same).
As a Spanish speaker I find it much easier to understand spoken Italian than spoken Portuguese. However it’s much easier to read Portuguese than Italian.
Also same grammar and even many expressions are the same (for example, we both ask people’s name by saying what translates as “how do you call yourself”, which is also the same as the French).
Then there are also all sorts of quirky cultural similarities - I remember being in this tiny village in the mountains in Peru and they had a bullfight in this tiny arena were the “bull” was really more of a calf and a guy playing a clarinette when the bullfighter went in, with people joking about how that seriously scrawny looking bull was a “cow”, and all of that was just like it would happen in Portugal, up to and including the music being played on the clarinette. Bullfighting isn’t even all that big in Portugal anymore, but it was funny how in a Spanish-speaking country a continent away there were so many cultural similarities in this, even down to how people made fun of the “cow”.
I’m so confused. But thank you and I love you for helping try and understand.
Yes, it’s hard. Most people have an easier time with English.
It’s possible to babble some meaning across the languages without training, but actually speaking is hard.
Makes sense. I can’t understand a fucking word scots say
We can have conversations and kinda understand each other, Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish better than Spanish speakers Portuguese, mainly because they are more media and cultural influence of latin America on Brazil than the other way around.
I (English-speaker from the US) took Portuguese classes in graduate school. Everybody in the class but me was a native Spanish speaker and they struggled mightily to get the Portuguese pronunciation right since the two languages are so similar. I had no trouble with it at all since I didn’t speak Spanish and the teacher used to call on me all the time to read stuff while castigating everybody else for their bad pronunciation.
Spanish speakers often assume Portuguese will be an easy language to learn because both are very similar in grammar and orthography, but many end up sounding with a heavy spanish accent when they attempt to speak Portuguese because they don’t emphasize phonetic differences and proper pronunciation compared to students from other languages do.
It’s strange that as a native portuguese speaker, I can understand spanish (at least the mexican one from chavo) fine, but my spanish friends can’t understand me at all.
That’s pretty normal, a few years ago I ran into these Brazilian bikers in Argentina and they didn’t speak Spanish or English, so it was really hard to communicate. We (Spanish speakers) really rely on you guys understanding us. I can read Portuguese without much trouble, though, it’s the pronunciation that gets me.
Pizza restaurant in Portugal, my then gf trying, phrase book/dictionary in hand, to order herself a choose your own toppings pizza in Portuguese. Waitress: “This might be quicker in English, I’m from South Africa”. Long conversation ensued about how a South African of Indian extraction ended up working in a pizza restaurant on the Algarve 🙂
In telephony we call that a transcoding path
In my experience, this is quite a common thing to happen to multillingual people when living, or just out on vacations, abroad.
I lived 2 decades abroad and this kind of thing happenned to me a couple of times.
Mind you, once you trully master a foreign language you start being able to tell accents apart, so are more likelly to spot that somebody is speaking that language with an accent from somewhere else, but it’s pretty hard and takes time to reach that level of mastery of a foreign language (personally I only ever got there with the English language) so it’s more likelly one is just good enough at it or even fluent but can’t spot that, say, the person you’ve been speaking to in a foreign language is one of your countrymen.
Lol this is hilarious. Me mata de la risa
