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.
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
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?
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.
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.
The word you’re looking for is Schadenfreude
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.
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
Cobra chicken?
Just to add that ‘doigts de pied’ is ok, but there is a specific word in French too (‘orteils’)
I only speak English. I have this issue all the time.
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 :)
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.
It goes both ways - when I speak German I have an obvious English-speaker accent and many Germans will just answer me in English 😄
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
It’s hard for Brazilians to speak Spanish? Whenever I heard someone speak Brazilianese I feel like I’m having a stroker 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
deleted by creator
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.
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).
I’m so confused. But thank you and I love you for helping try and understand.
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
Your command of the english language is good, but you’re speaking it weird. Over there your family and their dogs. Oh wait! Your dogs! They’re getting into the garbage can over there!
Fun fact Greek and Spanish sound extremely similar. They have nearly identical sounds. They’re not all that closely related though.
I’m sorry but I have absolute certainty the second story is fake. There’s is no way, absolutely none, that two Brazilians speaking English couldn’t identify each others accents within seconds of the conversation. Maybe if they were living in the US or UK for 10 years, but this happened in Argentina. 100% fake story.
::blink:: just, a, what country do you think this is?:blink blink::
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.
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”
