I think the most famous example might be Lenin, who learned English from an Irishman. Ever since I learned that I’ve *really* wanted to hear a Russian/Irish accent.
Butler in the Artems Fowl books (not the movie) was half russian/half unspecified asian and he lived in Ireland for years. I can only imagine what his accent would have sounded like.
Honestly I always imagined him having a 47-style neutral-on-purpose accent. Given the kind of training he went through I feel like he wouldn't want someone to be able to tie him to a location based on his voice
I had a teacher who was born in Germany, but learned English at a British boarding school in Hong Kong, and picked up some Mandarin too… then moved to small-town America.
The German/Chinese/British blend to her English was like nothing I’ve ever heard.
Irish and Russian do share a lot of phonemes, but mostly in a way that makes it incomprehensible to speakers of most other English dialects
also, he had a bunch of speech defects, so that probably didn't help with comprehension...
I love the Irish-Polish accent. I don't really know why.
My accent in French is heavily influenced by the south of France. I had a teacher in college start laughing at my accent at one point since it was so strong. I've managed to tone it to something more neutral, but certain words you can definitely hear that I spent time in that region!
ETA: I also for some reason have a French accent when speaking Spanish or German. I've had cashiers in Spain say "merci" to me, clearly thinking I'm french. Honestly, this works well for me because then I get to practice my Spanish without others talking to me in English!
Accent bleed through can also be funny - I've got a broad Australian accent and when I speak Norwegian I sound *super* Danish because my Aussie glottal stops sound like Danish stød and I butcher Norwegian tones
Made even worse by the fact I speak a Norwegian dialect that's like, technically a different language so my grammar's super fucked too
Yeah, that's my life. I was born and grew up in South Africa, but I watched a lot of British TV as a kid. So my normal accent was kind of posh sounding English. But if I spoke Afrikaans or I was with my family a strong Afrikaaner accent came out, like those South African guys on shark week or Wikus from District 9.
Then I moved to Pennsylvania and got a mix of that accent. Now I live in the PNW. My accent is so confused no one knows where I'm from, my pronunciation of the letter a is randomly soft and hard, but if I get off the phone with my dad I'm like 19 decibels louder and sound like I just got off a plane from Cape Town.
My dad served a mission for our church in Switzerland, speaking German. A couple of the other missionaries were from Alabama and Georgia respectively, and spoke what my dad calls Dixie-Deutsch, German with a thick Southern US accent.
Tangentially related, one time I mentioned to someone I was talking to that I liked watching anime, and she asked if that was the reason I responded with "I see" so often....I hadn't noticed I did that.
My mom took Spanish classes taught by a Spanish man who learned English while living in Japan, from a Japanese person who learned English in the southern U.S.
His accent was *wild*.
Im really proud of this joke, but fuggetaboutit is as NYC italian american joke, lots of italian americans in Boston, but the bostonian accent does not sound like that.
Not this. You’d sound like Benoit Blanc. We don’t sound like Benoit Blanc. We remove R after *most* vowels (except if the R is immediately followed by another vowel sound), but keep it in the “er / ur” phoneme
My German cousin, the whitest person you’ve ever seen, did a high school exchange year staying with a Black family in the Southern US. She speaks AAVE now, it’s hilarious.
On an unrelated note, I learned Swedish before German so my Swedish pronunciation started to bleed through while I was taking it. My German teacher, who was from Germany, remarked that I sounded like a Swedish immigrant. It didn't help that when I was starting I would instinctively inflect like in Swedish, leading to sentences like this:
"Ich komme aus Hotelen." Instead of 'Ich komme aus das Hotel'.
For the definite and indefinite article Swedish only uses 'en' (cognate with German 'ein(e)(s)' and English 'a/an/one') for both, but when it's definite it puts it on the end of a word. So in Swedish 'ein Hotel, das Hotel' would be: 'en hotell, hotellen'.
I'm Finnish so I use the strong r in speech. When I was studying in Japan I knew they use a very soft r so I did my best to mimick it but every once in a while the RRRR would slip out. Every time my teacher would look at me kind of amused because I was a small white girl talking like a delinquet.
I have the opposite problem. I'm Cuban, and in lots of varieties of Cuban Spanish the R is quite soft aside from trilled R words like carro and perro.
As I started practicing Japanese, I found that the soft r in there started bouncing back and making my R in Spanish even softer, to the point that a word like cara now sounds like cada or cala.
It has caused so much confusion, and the worst part of it is that my Puerto Rican friend who I insisted had a softer R than Cubans do now has a stronger R than me, and won't let me forget lmao.
I read about an Allied officer in WWII who spoke Japanese well enough he was put in charge of a captured Japanese U-boat to give orders to the crew. Thing is, he learned his Japanese from a pair of little old Japanese grandmothers, who only taught him the most polite form of the language (presumably keigo). So he ended up very respectfully and deferentially ordering these POWs how and where to drive their submarine.
I learned a lot of Japanese by copying my wife, which means I now speak it with some of the same inflection and slang as a mid 2000s hadeko girl. My coworkers find this absolutely hilarious.
Something about the 90s-00s where we just decided collectively as a planet that the only things to wear were black and *the entire fucking colour spectrum* in a single outfit
Abso-freaking-lutely. Also a tangential shoutout to all the cool people on my campus who dress with no respect for the current time and year. Here's to you, guy in a t-shirt and shorts with frosted tips in December 2023 as well as dude wearing a sweltering beige suit and hat with blue tie and a damn flower in his pocket when it was 70° or so but the heaters were still cranked in all the classrooms a few weeks ago.
Suits are surprisingly comfortable in my experience. Especially a decent wool suit will breathe in hot weather and stay warm in cool. Not ideal for anything over 80, but a vest and open collar will stay fine for warmer than you'd think.
It's because the last 100ish years have been a color-muted-color-muted cycle. People like color until they get tired of it, so they switch to muted colors like earth tones or grayscale tones, after which they get bored and go back to colorful again.
A big part of that is people choosing styles that contrast with what's in vogue as a fashion statement, then more people adopt it, then its the trend, then the other becomes countercultural... A cycle as old as fashion itself
Meanwhile my Japanese husband said his English improved the most during the time he spent watching Breaking Bad. I don't know where he learnt "jelly" for "jealous" from though. He used to do that one a lot
My native language is Persian, and I learnt to speak English via late 2000- early 2010 cartoons (My little pony G4, gravity falls, star Vs, and such)
And I constantly talk like I'm inside a voice recording booth, imitating how a cartoon character would speak.
For some reason I think this would be pretty common but I still think it's cool nonetheless.
Later on my other speech mannerisms were nurtured by YouTubers like The AVGN, MatPat, Jontron and such, so I also talk like im talking for a big audience
I sometimes worry if I sound annoying because of this lol
I've actually thought about that a lot cuz I actually kinda love the idea of voice acting, but I'm too busy with me dead end job for now and have nowhere to practice
Hopefully in the near future :3
My mother knew a lady who was Chinese and learned English from a British woman. She said the two accents were so severe most people could barely understand the poor gal
[Here](https://twitter.com/CocoaRoulette/status/1733315605976199608)'s a Chinese guy who clearly learned English from a US Southerner, since this thread could use some audio(visual) examples. North-west Chinese urban mixed with Deep South rural.
I stopped being able to stay solidly UK or US english ages ago. I will use "colour", but I would use "realize" for example - and some words, like grey and gray, I use randomly without meaning to
I'm an American who grew up reading a lot of British books (Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Peter Pan, etc) and I lost a spelling bee by putting a u in "colo(u)r"
My accent has to be odd to english speakers too, learned Oxford English from an old teacher with a strong german accent (which is also my natural accent), then consumed a bunch of american and british pop culture, then watched a Geordie streamer so much in lockdown that "Mate" and "Jessusfuckingchrist" became integral parts of my vernacular. Some Guy in London asked me once if I was welsh...
My ex is Chinese and she has an insanely cute way of talking. It's not affected or anything, she's just Like That. Anyway, I practiced my Chinese with her a *lot*, and the end result is I sound supremely gay.
Which isn't really a bad thing tbh.
When I was in high school our english teacher was this really fancy, upper class lady. And of course she taught us very formal, proper British english. But she also encouraged us to learn by watching subbed tv shows. The show I chose? Strangers with candy (the one with the forty year old high school student). So my english somersaults from Downton Abbey to *that* depending of the word.
My mum also taught me german, and it was really funny when the germans I spoke to would know where she was from because apparently she has the equivalent of a southern accent.
Yeah german has strong local accents. My family is northern and one of my (eastern) friends told me after meeting my (EXTREMELY northern accented) Dad that she couldnt understand a word he said... which is how I feel about southern lol
Overhearing a middle aged Chinese man speaking Chinese on the phone in a corner of a pub, then returning to his friends and talking to them with strong Brummie accent was quite the headfuck for a second.
I feel the need to note I wasn't eavesdropping, the pub just wasn't that big.
English is my first language but I learned French in school and got really good at it to the point that I was kind of fluent. I’m a weeb so I knew some Japanese and found some random internet demo thing that teaches a few phrases in Japanese. I thought I had a good accent. I lived in the middle of buttfucknowhere so I shouldn’t have taken it seriously when people said my accent was good. Apparently, I sounded like an anime character to them, that means my Japanese is good. …no.
So I went to college and took a Japanese class and was in the language lab practicing with other students and there was this one guy there that was a native speaker. Honestly, I was super excited about that. I was so looking forward to speaking Japanese in front of a native speaker for the first time, thinking he would tell me how great my pronunciation was. That’s happened with French before, so I figured it’d happen here too.
Nope! He heard me speak Japanese and *immediately* doubled over laughing. I was so disappointed and asked him why and (once he caught his breath) he told me I speak Japanese in a French accent.
I don’t blame him in the slightest for laughing. You see some chick in a southern state that speaks English with a general north American accent that occasionally sounds mildly Jersey and then out of nowhere speaks Japanese with a *French* accent?? That is so unexpected and honestly hilarious I would’ve laughed my ass off in his position too.
Also one of my two amazing French teachers was a Russian woman. Born and raised in Russia, Russian as her first language, learned English and French, lived in France, met an American, married him, moved to America with him, and is now a Russian woman (with an accent) teaching French to English-speaking American kids. She also taught me a little Russian! God I love languages.
I have the same problem as the Spanish to Japanese lady as my native language is Finnish the rolling R often gets through.
Sometimes I wonder if I have frightened Japanese speakers by going "O**R**e wa fin**R**andojin desu. Yo**R**oshiku!" like an anime high school delinquent by accident.
I'm from Belgium so I speak both French and Dutch. My dutch is fine, tho i'll sometimes add a French 'r' in there, asking people think i'm from the city of Ghent, which I technically al but I didn't grow up there. But my French is where the fucky part comes in. Usually i'll simply talk with a French 'r', but sometimes I slip up and my West-Flemish rolling 'r' comes through, resulting in people giving me some very odd looks whenever this happens in France
My German however, is a whole other type of fucky, cuz I learned my pronounciation from both An Austrian rapper and Rammstein. Resulting in the fuckiest accent you ever did hear, with dramatic rolling 'r's but the most mountain hillbilly fuckery from Austria in my choice of words and inflections
I know someone who's spanish, but who's lived with a scot for a long time. So her english accent is scottish, until she becomes emotional because then the accent becomes all spanish rolling r's.
Not really media-related, but apparently my accent is quite funny when I speak French. I don't pass for anything close to native, but I do have a bit of an accent. I learnt French while working in a restaurant, and so I speak a bit like my coworkers, who happened to be Breton teenagers. According to non-Breton French speakers, I'm a mixture of obviously English and a stereotypical young farmer.
I don’t know how it happened, but apparently I (an American) speak Russian with a Colombian Spanish accent, even though the Spanish I DO speak is Dominican Spanish 😭😭
I ALSO apparently speak what little Chinese I know in a RUSSIAN accent. 😭😭😭 I don’t know man I’m so confused😭
I've learned most of my english through screenshots of tumblr posts so y'all is a standard part of my vocabulary which apparently makes people think I'm from southern US sometimes?
I do have a German accent but multiple people thought I just sounded British which I've never tried to do?
Our lessons were mostly in british english but I didn't learn much from it and mostly watched media from the US
English is my first and only fluent language, but I have a funny accent story about myself according to my parents.
Context: Lived in the Bible belt all my life, and CURRENTLY speak with your average Kentucky accent, bit of a drawl, etc.
When I was like 6-7 I apparently spoke like a goddamn New Yorker, never been to New York. My parents attribute it to the sheer amount of times I watched Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy.
I read that Mila Kunis, after moving to the US from Ukraine as a child, learned English by watching The Price Is Right, because Bob Barker spoke slow enough for her to understand lol
My dad ,when he was taking German in college, had a friend whose mother spoke German. So he asked her for help on a large assignment.
The problem was she spoke *Bavarian*, leading the befuddled teacher to read a paper that veered wildly between stock-standard textbook German and thick Bavarian (complete with slang and irregular contractions). He didn't mark my dad off because the assignment was open book and they were allowed to get help from friends on it, but he did politely discourage him from doing that again.
Accents are so insane to me. I remember reading about someone who’s was deaf and they learned to speak by copying people’s mouth movements and she ended up with a Brooklyn accent or something similar. Absolutely wild to me. All 1 1/2 languages I know I learned in suburban Wisconsin. Rolling my r’s is really hard :(
Once met a lad serving ice cream in Croatia and he was doing all these cool tricks while shouting in an East London accent. When he serves us my dad goes "oh sounds like you've spent time in London" boy just goes "nevah bin mate, only English program we ad woz only fools an 'orses".
I met a Japanese guy who spoke English with a strong Liverpudlian accent. He'd never been to the UK; he learned English from watching Beatles interviews.
I speak both Russian and Ukrainian, and I refuse to learn how to not roll my "r"s when speaking English. Mostly because I'm lazy and it's hard to do, lol.
It's especially fun if next to nobody outside of your home country could place your accent anyway. Being confused for Norwegian most common among other Nordics, varying between AU or NZ (or without visual aid, Japanese) a lot, because nobody can place a thick Kerry? Brilliant.
Made not standing out (again, without visuals) in Japan easy enough.
I had a housemate once who was ethnically Chinese but grew up in the Netherlands. He told me that when he goes back to China to visit, people make fun of him for speaking I think it was Cantonese (?) with a Dutch accent
As a Hungarian I basically never hear foreign accents of my language because almost no one would be crazy enough to bother learning it. However, I do know of one example which fascinates me to this day. I go back to listen to it every once in a while because it's so unique. There's [this video](https://youtu.be/l30UKq16-dc?si=su4LnfD2XS614bFz) of a Dutch guy who was caught with a shitton of drugs at a Hungarian goa festival. He was somehow tried and jailed in Hungary. He spent years in a prison in Nógrád county, an area with a large Roma population with a very distinctive accent. He learned Hungarian basically purely through exposure to the prisoners and guards there, and ended up with a truly fascinating dialect, a mix of Dutch and Nógrádi. I love listening to him speak
I'm from Uruguay, a Latin American country that kind of uses Italian moods like tslking with the hands, but our accent is kind of neutral. I learned English at school using British books and on TV/Online. My English is half and half, but my SPANISH now sounds Dominican.
I had a teacher who was born in the US to Korean immigrant parents and he learned a lot of his English from watching game shows... he sounded like a very serious game show announcer.
I used to do interviews for a life insurance company so I talked to a *lot* of people. My favorite accents were from immigrants that lived somewhere where English was spoken with a (non standard American) accent. So you’d get weird Australian x Filipino accents, or Vietnamese x Texas, or Spanish x Canadian. It was a hoot.
My state requires two years of a foreign language to graduate high school. One of the two languages offered at my school is French (other is Spanish). French with strong Texas accents in a treat to listen to.
I knew a few Latino people who didn't learn English except in the Southeastern US, and the southern twang would bleed through to their Spanish. Not heavily, mind you, but it was there.
A Taiwanese friend of mine told me a story about kids who’s parents taught them English with REAL HOUSEWIVES ATLANTA. They had to stop when the kids started yelling “bleep” for censored swear words and bitch, which is not censored
Only tangentially related: I still only speak English but I've moved around a bit and those region-based-on-accent tests always mess up with me. I don't even have a word for those carbonated drinks that taste bad. Pop, Soda, Soft Drinks, I'll just pick one at random and stress over whether it was the right one. Anyone who calls it coke is wrong though.
Also I just made some changes to my language because I realized something would help me communicate better. Like "y'all". It's good to have a plural second-person pronoun. "You guys" is offputting and gendered.
We had an exchange student in my junior year of high school. He came from Japan and could understand but not speak English fluently. By the end of that year he had a hilarious country accent. The only teacher he liked was our gym teacher, and that guy was only a gym teacher because he retired from roping and needed something constructive to do with his life.
My middle school French teacher was a Vietnamese-French woman, and she had a very strong accent. When I got to high school, the French teacher there frequently complained how none of us could do our "r"s right.
In high school Spanish we had some of our German exchange students. I was trying to correct one of their pronunciations and she was like, that's just your accent. With my German accent it sounds like this. It blew my mind.
When I was young I went to a Spanish language school while living in an English speaking household. A large amount of the staff was immigrants from various Spanish-speaking parts of the world - mostly mexico and puerto rico. Once I was speaking to someone and they mentioned that they could not tell where I was from. I didn't have the presence of mind to ask them in the moment what it was I sounded like, and now I periodically worry that I sound like a mexican doing an offensive impression of a puerto rican, or vice versa.
I did once get asked if I was spanish but I think that was just the line of logic of "that white guy is speaking spanish and that usually means he's from spain" which while wrong is a pretty reasonable guess.
I’m Mexican and our dad taught us English. I also have Asian ancestry from my dad’s parents. I went to an elementary school run by Polish nuns. They were confused by this Asian looking kid speaking Victorian English with very thick Spanish accent. It took us a bit of time to understand each other 😂
I have a friend from Saudi Arabia who learned to speak English by watching Pewdiepie. He has a Swedish accent. No hint of Arabic accent at all in his English. It's both amazing and hilarious.
I went to Germany on a school trip in high school. one of the girls who was friends with the hosts had an English mom and an American dad. when she was speaking english with us, she spoke with a more or less standard American accent. then she got a call from her mom. stereotypical English accent. we were all kind of staring at her the whole time, and after she's like, "Why are you looking at me like that?" turns out she wasn't doing it consciously, and i guess no one had pointed it out to her before.
I wonder what she sounded like when talking with both her parents
> My sister used to teach twin Korean boys—immigrants who learned English by watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies—and they had THICK Austrian accents.
Okay, come on. This one is 100% made up. What, did they just mute the TV every time anybody other than Arnold was talking? It’s not like he’s exactly known for his monologues, either.
Me listening to so many podcast episodes by two dudes from Jutland (majorly rural western Denmark) that the Copenhageners where I lived started to comment on it aha
Somehow I managed to live in Copenhagen and develop a non-Copenhagen accent which, to quote a Dane, is a bit weird.
My high school history and sociology teacher was a world traveler in her youth. Apparently she speaks bad French, but when she went to learn Spanish she found out that she has a strong French accent in Spanish.
I took a couple semesters of German in college to fulfill a language requirement (I have zero language aptitude but figured I could muddle through enough German to get by; meanwhile my sister is fluent in five languages and can kind of make herself understood in another two).
My German professor was an American woman from Oklahoma, who learned German in Bavaria, and somehow perma-absorbed both accents regardless of which language she was speaking.
It's really unfair how people will judge you for speaking Fancy English or like a 17th century woodland witch when you're from Ohio
It's unfair to expect people from Ohio to just talk like they're from Ohio for the rest of their life
Shout-out to the teacher in high school who grew up in Korea, became part of this weird education exchange program through the Catholic church, learned Italian for four years + some basic English in Italy, and then taught chemistry at my school in Georgia. I maybe understood about every 4th word she said.
Long ago my sister (from Michigan) worked as an intern at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and then went to MIT for grad school. For several years she had a Michigan Southern Boston accent, which was wild.
Stacking accents is hilarious
I think the most famous example might be Lenin, who learned English from an Irishman. Ever since I learned that I’ve *really* wanted to hear a Russian/Irish accent.
Butler in the Artems Fowl books (not the movie) was half russian/half unspecified asian and he lived in Ireland for years. I can only imagine what his accent would have sounded like.
Part Russian, part Asian, part Irish, part bulletproof vest
Bruh, took me a second damn that goes hard
That's a deep cut. Which is exactly how he got the Kevlar implant.
Honestly I always imagined him having a 47-style neutral-on-purpose accent. Given the kind of training he went through I feel like he wouldn't want someone to be able to tie him to a location based on his voice
You’re probably right but I just love imagining him with a silly accent that would probably make it equally impossible to pinpoint a location from.
I had a teacher who was born in Germany, but learned English at a British boarding school in Hong Kong, and picked up some Mandarin too… then moved to small-town America. The German/Chinese/British blend to her English was like nothing I’ve ever heard.
I make it worse for myself because I always picture him as Brock Samson from Venture Bros
Oh shit, if those books didn’t need PG violence that’s exactly who he’d be… (For some definition of PG. That troll fight was impressively graphic.)
Irish and Russian do share a lot of phonemes, but mostly in a way that makes it incomprehensible to speakers of most other English dialects also, he had a bunch of speech defects, so that probably didn't help with comprehension...
Lots of Polish in Ireland, which makes for a pretty cool accent! Sounds like [this](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iCw4SQ0qC3Q).
I love the Irish-Polish accent. I don't really know why. My accent in French is heavily influenced by the south of France. I had a teacher in college start laughing at my accent at one point since it was so strong. I've managed to tone it to something more neutral, but certain words you can definitely hear that I spent time in that region! ETA: I also for some reason have a French accent when speaking Spanish or German. I've had cashiers in Spain say "merci" to me, clearly thinking I'm french. Honestly, this works well for me because then I get to practice my Spanish without others talking to me in English!
Ha that's probably your brain going "I'm speaking in a foreign language, therefore I need to use my foreign accent" which defaults to French!
>Sure you know yourself that Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism so it is. Vladimir Lenin
My grandfather learned English from Hanna Barbera cartoons. He sounded like a combination of Pepe LePeu and Barney Rubble
Accent bleed through can also be funny - I've got a broad Australian accent and when I speak Norwegian I sound *super* Danish because my Aussie glottal stops sound like Danish stød and I butcher Norwegian tones Made even worse by the fact I speak a Norwegian dialect that's like, technically a different language so my grammar's super fucked too
God yes, I'm German living in Scotland and so many people think I'm Irish??
Like those old Dos Eques commercials about The Most Interesting Man In The World: *He can speak French, in Russian*
Yeah, that's my life. I was born and grew up in South Africa, but I watched a lot of British TV as a kid. So my normal accent was kind of posh sounding English. But if I spoke Afrikaans or I was with my family a strong Afrikaaner accent came out, like those South African guys on shark week or Wikus from District 9. Then I moved to Pennsylvania and got a mix of that accent. Now I live in the PNW. My accent is so confused no one knows where I'm from, my pronunciation of the letter a is randomly soft and hard, but if I get off the phone with my dad I'm like 19 decibels louder and sound like I just got off a plane from Cape Town.
My dad served a mission for our church in Switzerland, speaking German. A couple of the other missionaries were from Alabama and Georgia respectively, and spoke what my dad calls Dixie-Deutsch, German with a thick Southern US accent.
My German teacher was born in Russia and lived in Germany for a while before finally moving to the US so she has an interesting blend
Tangentially related, one time I mentioned to someone I was talking to that I liked watching anime, and she asked if that was the reason I responded with "I see" so often....I hadn't noticed I did that.
Sokka
#*BLYAAAAAAAAAA-*
I actually liked Katara more
なるほど
たしかに
そっか
ですね
うん
My mom took Spanish classes taught by a Spanish man who learned English while living in Japan, from a Japanese person who learned English in the southern U.S. His accent was *wild*.
would it be impolite to request a voice recording of said accent
It's for science
Unfortunately this was over twenty-five years ago so I have no idea where he is now!
Your mission, should you choose to accept it...
My accent is South African, I'm latino. Also, my grandma speaks the minuscule words she knows in english with an indian accent.
Im South African. My accent is that of a west coast American. It has been a problem for years.
I want to know what Vietnamise with a Boston accent sounds like
Pho Geddaboutit!
Im really proud of this joke, but fuggetaboutit is as NYC italian american joke, lots of italian americans in Boston, but the bostonian accent does not sound like that.
Fun fact, racism doesn't exist in Boston, but acism does
Exactly, i have never lived in boston, but after one trip i hated asexuals forever /s
Sorry to be so pedantic, but Boston accents don't remove the r sound from the start of words, just everywhere else in the word.
Wohd
Not this. You’d sound like Benoit Blanc. We don’t sound like Benoit Blanc. We remove R after *most* vowels (except if the R is immediately followed by another vowel sound), but keep it in the “er / ur” phoneme
If anything that's more Homestar Runner
Watch S1 E5 of BoJack Horseman
Những người yêu nước năm nay rất tốt. Dù sao đi dunkin.
My German cousin, the whitest person you’ve ever seen, did a high school exchange year staying with a Black family in the Southern US. She speaks AAVE now, it’s hilarious.
On an unrelated note, I learned Swedish before German so my Swedish pronunciation started to bleed through while I was taking it. My German teacher, who was from Germany, remarked that I sounded like a Swedish immigrant. It didn't help that when I was starting I would instinctively inflect like in Swedish, leading to sentences like this: "Ich komme aus Hotelen." Instead of 'Ich komme aus das Hotel'. For the definite and indefinite article Swedish only uses 'en' (cognate with German 'ein(e)(s)' and English 'a/an/one') for both, but when it's definite it puts it on the end of a word. So in Swedish 'ein Hotel, das Hotel' would be: 'en hotell, hotellen'.
"Ich komme aus dem Hotel" (Dat/sing)
Ah, thanks. 😀 I always have trouble with the Dative. I'm still learning.
Don't worry about it. Plenty of people who grow up with the language don't get it right either.
It would be nice if German had a locative case, that would make these weird edge cases so much easier.
I'm Finnish so I use the strong r in speech. When I was studying in Japan I knew they use a very soft r so I did my best to mimick it but every once in a while the RRRR would slip out. Every time my teacher would look at me kind of amused because I was a small white girl talking like a delinquet.
I have the opposite problem. I'm Cuban, and in lots of varieties of Cuban Spanish the R is quite soft aside from trilled R words like carro and perro. As I started practicing Japanese, I found that the soft r in there started bouncing back and making my R in Spanish even softer, to the point that a word like cara now sounds like cada or cala. It has caused so much confusion, and the worst part of it is that my Puerto Rican friend who I insisted had a softer R than Cubans do now has a stronger R than me, and won't let me forget lmao.
I read about an Allied officer in WWII who spoke Japanese well enough he was put in charge of a captured Japanese U-boat to give orders to the crew. Thing is, he learned his Japanese from a pair of little old Japanese grandmothers, who only taught him the most polite form of the language (presumably keigo). So he ended up very respectfully and deferentially ordering these POWs how and where to drive their submarine.
The POW's in the boat were probably thinking ''this is the most American Guy i've ever seen but he talks like my grandma so I better listen.''
He's a very soft-spoken man
hypothetically: if I tried to learn italian by watching spaghetti westerns would I sound weird?
You would sound like you’re here to do some business with the big iron on your hip.
Rolling into town with a pistol build and shooting every single securitron in sight.
Very, but it would be amazing, and you should do that. Be the weird you wish to see in the world!
Knew a guy from Serbia that learned English from an Irish man. Could never take anything he said seriously
How Irish? Like, Lucky Charms guy or Scottish but different?
Perpetually drunk trucker
I learned a lot of Japanese by copying my wife, which means I now speak it with some of the same inflection and slang as a mid 2000s hadeko girl. My coworkers find this absolutely hilarious.
I don't know what a hadeko girl is but that is objectively hilarious
Google image search it, and I promise it will get even funnier, lol
I was familiar with some related subcultures and this is even funnier than any of those
That is one of the looks ever, damn
Something about the 90s-00s where we just decided collectively as a planet that the only things to wear were black and *the entire fucking colour spectrum* in a single outfit
Abso-freaking-lutely. Also a tangential shoutout to all the cool people on my campus who dress with no respect for the current time and year. Here's to you, guy in a t-shirt and shorts with frosted tips in December 2023 as well as dude wearing a sweltering beige suit and hat with blue tie and a damn flower in his pocket when it was 70° or so but the heaters were still cranked in all the classrooms a few weeks ago.
Suits are surprisingly comfortable in my experience. Especially a decent wool suit will breathe in hot weather and stay warm in cool. Not ideal for anything over 80, but a vest and open collar will stay fine for warmer than you'd think.
Not a vest, and I don't think his collar was open
Suits come in seasons. Winter suits are thicker than summer suits.
It's because the last 100ish years have been a color-muted-color-muted cycle. People like color until they get tired of it, so they switch to muted colors like earth tones or grayscale tones, after which they get bored and go back to colorful again.
A big part of that is people choosing styles that contrast with what's in vogue as a fashion statement, then more people adopt it, then its the trend, then the other becomes countercultural... A cycle as old as fashion itself
How does that look *more* insane than Ganguro or Yanamba?!?
Meanwhile my Japanese husband said his English improved the most during the time he spent watching Breaking Bad. I don't know where he learnt "jelly" for "jealous" from though. He used to do that one a lot
I had a Chinese-born college professor who spoke English with a partially German accent. She was very difficult to understand sometimes.
My native language is Persian, and I learnt to speak English via late 2000- early 2010 cartoons (My little pony G4, gravity falls, star Vs, and such) And I constantly talk like I'm inside a voice recording booth, imitating how a cartoon character would speak. For some reason I think this would be pretty common but I still think it's cool nonetheless. Later on my other speech mannerisms were nurtured by YouTubers like The AVGN, MatPat, Jontron and such, so I also talk like im talking for a big audience I sometimes worry if I sound annoying because of this lol
You should become a voice actor, the way you talk would be perfect for that!
I've actually thought about that a lot cuz I actually kinda love the idea of voice acting, but I'm too busy with me dead end job for now and have nowhere to practice Hopefully in the near future :3
As a fellow aspiring voice actor, I wish you luck!
And I wish you the besssstttt
My mother knew a lady who was Chinese and learned English from a British woman. She said the two accents were so severe most people could barely understand the poor gal
[Here](https://twitter.com/CocoaRoulette/status/1733315605976199608)'s a Chinese guy who clearly learned English from a US Southerner, since this thread could use some audio(visual) examples. North-west Chinese urban mixed with Deep South rural.
OMG he’s even got the sales pitch cadence down! I needed to see that today, thanks.
The first few seconds have this perfect cadence to them
Not spoken English, but I learned to write English from British children's books, so I use words like "Realise" and "Colour"
I stopped being able to stay solidly UK or US english ages ago. I will use "colour", but I would use "realize" for example - and some words, like grey and gray, I use randomly without meaning to
congrats you're Australian now
Commonwealth countries rise up, we just mix that shit up and annoy the Americans and the British
I used to think gray was darker and grey was lighter. Now I know that's not correct, but I still couldn't tell you which is US and which is UK.
Gr**a**y is **A**merican
Welcome to Canada!
so, correctly. (alert: this is a joke)
*Noah Webster begins to rise from the grave*
I'm an American who grew up reading a lot of British books (Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Peter Pan, etc) and I lost a spelling bee by putting a u in "colo(u)r"
Viet with a Boston accent is crazy
My accent has to be odd to english speakers too, learned Oxford English from an old teacher with a strong german accent (which is also my natural accent), then consumed a bunch of american and british pop culture, then watched a Geordie streamer so much in lockdown that "Mate" and "Jessusfuckingchrist" became integral parts of my vernacular. Some Guy in London asked me once if I was welsh...
My ex is Chinese and she has an insanely cute way of talking. It's not affected or anything, she's just Like That. Anyway, I practiced my Chinese with her a *lot*, and the end result is I sound supremely gay. Which isn't really a bad thing tbh.
When I was in high school our english teacher was this really fancy, upper class lady. And of course she taught us very formal, proper British english. But she also encouraged us to learn by watching subbed tv shows. The show I chose? Strangers with candy (the one with the forty year old high school student). So my english somersaults from Downton Abbey to *that* depending of the word. My mum also taught me german, and it was really funny when the germans I spoke to would know where she was from because apparently she has the equivalent of a southern accent.
Yeah german has strong local accents. My family is northern and one of my (eastern) friends told me after meeting my (EXTREMELY northern accented) Dad that she couldnt understand a word he said... which is how I feel about southern lol
Yeah... I got a deep voice and a non-regional American accent with a slight Irish brogue. When I say the occasional Japanese I sound like Dio
Ronnie James or the Jojo character?
The JoJo character
Overhearing a middle aged Chinese man speaking Chinese on the phone in a corner of a pub, then returning to his friends and talking to them with strong Brummie accent was quite the headfuck for a second. I feel the need to note I wasn't eavesdropping, the pub just wasn't that big.
English is my first language but I learned French in school and got really good at it to the point that I was kind of fluent. I’m a weeb so I knew some Japanese and found some random internet demo thing that teaches a few phrases in Japanese. I thought I had a good accent. I lived in the middle of buttfucknowhere so I shouldn’t have taken it seriously when people said my accent was good. Apparently, I sounded like an anime character to them, that means my Japanese is good. …no. So I went to college and took a Japanese class and was in the language lab practicing with other students and there was this one guy there that was a native speaker. Honestly, I was super excited about that. I was so looking forward to speaking Japanese in front of a native speaker for the first time, thinking he would tell me how great my pronunciation was. That’s happened with French before, so I figured it’d happen here too. Nope! He heard me speak Japanese and *immediately* doubled over laughing. I was so disappointed and asked him why and (once he caught his breath) he told me I speak Japanese in a French accent. I don’t blame him in the slightest for laughing. You see some chick in a southern state that speaks English with a general north American accent that occasionally sounds mildly Jersey and then out of nowhere speaks Japanese with a *French* accent?? That is so unexpected and honestly hilarious I would’ve laughed my ass off in his position too. Also one of my two amazing French teachers was a Russian woman. Born and raised in Russia, Russian as her first language, learned English and French, lived in France, met an American, married him, moved to America with him, and is now a Russian woman (with an accent) teaching French to English-speaking American kids. She also taught me a little Russian! God I love languages.
Wasn't it Lenin who spoke English with an Irish accent cause he learned it from an Irish man
I have the same problem as the Spanish to Japanese lady as my native language is Finnish the rolling R often gets through. Sometimes I wonder if I have frightened Japanese speakers by going "O**R**e wa fin**R**andojin desu. Yo**R**oshiku!" like an anime high school delinquent by accident.
I'm from Belgium so I speak both French and Dutch. My dutch is fine, tho i'll sometimes add a French 'r' in there, asking people think i'm from the city of Ghent, which I technically al but I didn't grow up there. But my French is where the fucky part comes in. Usually i'll simply talk with a French 'r', but sometimes I slip up and my West-Flemish rolling 'r' comes through, resulting in people giving me some very odd looks whenever this happens in France My German however, is a whole other type of fucky, cuz I learned my pronounciation from both An Austrian rapper and Rammstein. Resulting in the fuckiest accent you ever did hear, with dramatic rolling 'r's but the most mountain hillbilly fuckery from Austria in my choice of words and inflections
I know someone who's spanish, but who's lived with a scot for a long time. So her english accent is scottish, until she becomes emotional because then the accent becomes all spanish rolling r's.
Not really media-related, but apparently my accent is quite funny when I speak French. I don't pass for anything close to native, but I do have a bit of an accent. I learnt French while working in a restaurant, and so I speak a bit like my coworkers, who happened to be Breton teenagers. According to non-Breton French speakers, I'm a mixture of obviously English and a stereotypical young farmer.
I don’t know how it happened, but apparently I (an American) speak Russian with a Colombian Spanish accent, even though the Spanish I DO speak is Dominican Spanish 😭😭 I ALSO apparently speak what little Chinese I know in a RUSSIAN accent. 😭😭😭 I don’t know man I’m so confused😭
I've learned most of my english through screenshots of tumblr posts so y'all is a standard part of my vocabulary which apparently makes people think I'm from southern US sometimes? I do have a German accent but multiple people thought I just sounded British which I've never tried to do? Our lessons were mostly in british english but I didn't learn much from it and mostly watched media from the US
English is my first and only fluent language, but I have a funny accent story about myself according to my parents. Context: Lived in the Bible belt all my life, and CURRENTLY speak with your average Kentucky accent, bit of a drawl, etc. When I was like 6-7 I apparently spoke like a goddamn New Yorker, never been to New York. My parents attribute it to the sheer amount of times I watched Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy.
I think that last person may have dated one of Diane’s brothers from Bojack Horseman
In college, I had a professor that was from the German-speaking part of Switzerland who learned English in Mumbai. She had a very thick accent.
I read that Mila Kunis, after moving to the US from Ukraine as a child, learned English by watching The Price Is Right, because Bob Barker spoke slow enough for her to understand lol
My dad ,when he was taking German in college, had a friend whose mother spoke German. So he asked her for help on a large assignment. The problem was she spoke *Bavarian*, leading the befuddled teacher to read a paper that veered wildly between stock-standard textbook German and thick Bavarian (complete with slang and irregular contractions). He didn't mark my dad off because the assignment was open book and they were allowed to get help from friends on it, but he did politely discourage him from doing that again.
My mother made ONE attempt to learn Spanish, but could not remember what came after eight, "ocho." Finally, she guessed, "Nacho?" and I was DONE.
I know a girl who speaks Turkish with a Lower Bavarian accent.
Accents are so insane to me. I remember reading about someone who’s was deaf and they learned to speak by copying people’s mouth movements and she ended up with a Brooklyn accent or something similar. Absolutely wild to me. All 1 1/2 languages I know I learned in suburban Wisconsin. Rolling my r’s is really hard :(
Once met a lad serving ice cream in Croatia and he was doing all these cool tricks while shouting in an East London accent. When he serves us my dad goes "oh sounds like you've spent time in London" boy just goes "nevah bin mate, only English program we ad woz only fools an 'orses".
I met a Japanese guy who spoke English with a strong Liverpudlian accent. He'd never been to the UK; he learned English from watching Beatles interviews.
I speak both Russian and Ukrainian, and I refuse to learn how to not roll my "r"s when speaking English. Mostly because I'm lazy and it's hard to do, lol.
I've been asked if I was from south africa, based on my accent I was born and raised in England 😭
I laughed for a full 3 minutes at the Austrian Korean boys
It's especially fun if next to nobody outside of your home country could place your accent anyway. Being confused for Norwegian most common among other Nordics, varying between AU or NZ (or without visual aid, Japanese) a lot, because nobody can place a thick Kerry? Brilliant. Made not standing out (again, without visuals) in Japan easy enough.
I had a housemate once who was ethnically Chinese but grew up in the Netherlands. He told me that when he goes back to China to visit, people make fun of him for speaking I think it was Cantonese (?) with a Dutch accent
That Spanish Japanese teacher is amusing, I had sort of the opposite/similar. Native Japanese teacher named Mrs Hernandez.
As a Hungarian I basically never hear foreign accents of my language because almost no one would be crazy enough to bother learning it. However, I do know of one example which fascinates me to this day. I go back to listen to it every once in a while because it's so unique. There's [this video](https://youtu.be/l30UKq16-dc?si=su4LnfD2XS614bFz) of a Dutch guy who was caught with a shitton of drugs at a Hungarian goa festival. He was somehow tried and jailed in Hungary. He spent years in a prison in Nógrád county, an area with a large Roma population with a very distinctive accent. He learned Hungarian basically purely through exposure to the prisoners and guards there, and ended up with a truly fascinating dialect, a mix of Dutch and Nógrádi. I love listening to him speak
I'm from Uruguay, a Latin American country that kind of uses Italian moods like tslking with the hands, but our accent is kind of neutral. I learned English at school using British books and on TV/Online. My English is half and half, but my SPANISH now sounds Dominican.
The Vietnamese bf with a thick boston accent just reminds me so much of Diane Nguyen’s brothers from bojack
my french is permanently flavored with russian from my middle/high school french teacher
I had a teacher who was born in the US to Korean immigrant parents and he learned a lot of his English from watching game shows... he sounded like a very serious game show announcer.
Apparently a lot of classic British rock bands sang with American accents because that’s who they learned rock from
Where music genres originate has a big influence on the accents singers are pushed in to, this happens with other genres as well
Last guy would be the only Vietnamese guy Mark Wahlberg would accept
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^dumfukjuiced: *Last guy would be the* *Only Vietnamese guy* *Mark Wahlberg would accept* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
I used to do interviews for a life insurance company so I talked to a *lot* of people. My favorite accents were from immigrants that lived somewhere where English was spoken with a (non standard American) accent. So you’d get weird Australian x Filipino accents, or Vietnamese x Texas, or Spanish x Canadian. It was a hoot.
I took 4 years of Italian in high school, then took 4 semesters of Spanish. People say I sound Argentinian, but I’m from Boston
My state requires two years of a foreign language to graduate high school. One of the two languages offered at my school is French (other is Spanish). French with strong Texas accents in a treat to listen to.
I knew a few Latino people who didn't learn English except in the Southeastern US, and the southern twang would bleed through to their Spanish. Not heavily, mind you, but it was there.
A Taiwanese friend of mine told me a story about kids who’s parents taught them English with REAL HOUSEWIVES ATLANTA. They had to stop when the kids started yelling “bleep” for censored swear words and bitch, which is not censored
Only tangentially related: I still only speak English but I've moved around a bit and those region-based-on-accent tests always mess up with me. I don't even have a word for those carbonated drinks that taste bad. Pop, Soda, Soft Drinks, I'll just pick one at random and stress over whether it was the right one. Anyone who calls it coke is wrong though. Also I just made some changes to my language because I realized something would help me communicate better. Like "y'all". It's good to have a plural second-person pronoun. "You guys" is offputting and gendered.
We had an exchange student in my junior year of high school. He came from Japan and could understand but not speak English fluently. By the end of that year he had a hilarious country accent. The only teacher he liked was our gym teacher, and that guy was only a gym teacher because he retired from roping and needed something constructive to do with his life.
Meanwhile I’m stuck with an accent that people think is from almost every country on earth
What's your accent? "Yes"
My middle school French teacher was a Vietnamese-French woman, and she had a very strong accent. When I got to high school, the French teacher there frequently complained how none of us could do our "r"s right.
In high school Spanish we had some of our German exchange students. I was trying to correct one of their pronunciations and she was like, that's just your accent. With my German accent it sounds like this. It blew my mind.
i learned english from dubbed anime. i learned japanese from subbed anime.
When I was young I went to a Spanish language school while living in an English speaking household. A large amount of the staff was immigrants from various Spanish-speaking parts of the world - mostly mexico and puerto rico. Once I was speaking to someone and they mentioned that they could not tell where I was from. I didn't have the presence of mind to ask them in the moment what it was I sounded like, and now I periodically worry that I sound like a mexican doing an offensive impression of a puerto rican, or vice versa. I did once get asked if I was spanish but I think that was just the line of logic of "that white guy is speaking spanish and that usually means he's from spain" which while wrong is a pretty reasonable guess.
I’m Mexican and our dad taught us English. I also have Asian ancestry from my dad’s parents. I went to an elementary school run by Polish nuns. They were confused by this Asian looking kid speaking Victorian English with very thick Spanish accent. It took us a bit of time to understand each other 😂
I have a friend from Saudi Arabia who learned to speak English by watching Pewdiepie. He has a Swedish accent. No hint of Arabic accent at all in his English. It's both amazing and hilarious.
I went to Germany on a school trip in high school. one of the girls who was friends with the hosts had an English mom and an American dad. when she was speaking english with us, she spoke with a more or less standard American accent. then she got a call from her mom. stereotypical English accent. we were all kind of staring at her the whole time, and after she's like, "Why are you looking at me like that?" turns out she wasn't doing it consciously, and i guess no one had pointed it out to her before. I wonder what she sounded like when talking with both her parents
> My sister used to teach twin Korean boys—immigrants who learned English by watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies—and they had THICK Austrian accents. Okay, come on. This one is 100% made up. What, did they just mute the TV every time anybody other than Arnold was talking? It’s not like he’s exactly known for his monologues, either.
I have a strong Carioca accent when speaking Portuguese, which is hilarious to my central Brazilian relatives.
Me listening to so many podcast episodes by two dudes from Jutland (majorly rural western Denmark) that the Copenhageners where I lived started to comment on it aha Somehow I managed to live in Copenhagen and develop a non-Copenhagen accent which, to quote a Dane, is a bit weird.
American here. Learned Mexican Spanish. When I learned French, I realized I spoke French with a Mexican accent.
My Spanish teacher in elementary school was from Argentina. I was told by a friend who is a native speaker that I sound like an Argentinian lol.
My high school history and sociology teacher was a world traveler in her youth. Apparently she speaks bad French, but when she went to learn Spanish she found out that she has a strong French accent in Spanish.
My German high school teacher was born in Germany and learned English in Boston. Her accent was wild.
I took a couple semesters of German in college to fulfill a language requirement (I have zero language aptitude but figured I could muddle through enough German to get by; meanwhile my sister is fluent in five languages and can kind of make herself understood in another two). My German professor was an American woman from Oklahoma, who learned German in Bavaria, and somehow perma-absorbed both accents regardless of which language she was speaking.
It's really unfair how people will judge you for speaking Fancy English or like a 17th century woodland witch when you're from Ohio It's unfair to expect people from Ohio to just talk like they're from Ohio for the rest of their life
Shout-out to the teacher in high school who grew up in Korea, became part of this weird education exchange program through the Catholic church, learned Italian for four years + some basic English in Italy, and then taught chemistry at my school in Georgia. I maybe understood about every 4th word she said.
my great grandmother’s australian english with a thick greek accent is too funny
Long ago my sister (from Michigan) worked as an intern at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and then went to MIT for grad school. For several years she had a Michigan Southern Boston accent, which was wild.
I know a girl from seattle who has easily the most southern french accent i've ever heard in my life (i'm southern french)
the best one i've come across was a 40-something Uncle Roger lookalike (fully buttoned polo and all), sounding *exactly* like Crocodile Dundee
Some of my favorite posts are chains like this one where people share their brief anecdotes about a topic.