Wannabe?

Guest   Sat Dec 15, 2007 12:24 am GMT
North Americans really are not picky about how foreigners speak English


noooooooo????
K. T.   Sat Dec 15, 2007 2:56 am GMT
We ARE picky in certain cases. Patients complain if nurses or Doctors or other healthcare personnel have foreign accents (all the time)...Sometimes the complaints are legitimate; sometimes they are not.

ESL teachers should speak clear English.

Emergency personnel should speak clear English. 911 operators...over-the-phone bankers.
Uriel   Sat Dec 15, 2007 7:21 pm GMT
<<Would you find it weird/wannabeish if a foreigner had an almost perfect American accent? (who didn't live in the country) >>

No. We would just think you had done a very good job at learning the language. I have met foreigners whose English and accent are so natural that I had no idea it wasn't their first language.

<<Would you find it weird if someone improved their English greatly from one time to another? >>

No -- you SHOULD be improving over time, after all! I think it's weirder when people seem to reach a "comfort level" and then STOP improving. My stepmother has done this -- so that now, when she makes the same grammatical mistakes she was making several years ago when she first moved here, it's actually more grating that she isn't trying harder. (Which is probably very unfair -- but there it is.) I think she has actually reached a psychological barrier in her own mind, because she was telling me last time I saw here that she now refuses to answer the phone, because she is unwilling to try to understand American accents. She attributes this to having learned British English, but since her accent doesn't even sound remotely British (it sounds very heavily German, if anything), I think this is really just an excuse she has rationalized in her own mind to deal with the daily frustration of living in a foreign country and having to speak an unfamiliar language.

<<What would your reaction be if you heard someone who had really good pronunciation but made a tiny grammar mistake every once in a while?>>

That's normal. No one expects perfection every time, and English grammar has so many eccentricities that it even trips native speakers up once in a while (I've gone back over sentences that just didn't sound right in my head trying to figure out if all the verbs and tenses really agree).