Do you wish you had a different accent?

Maybe you feel you sound too foreign as a non-native speaker. Or maybe as a native speaker you feel your accent has low social prestige. Or maybe you dream of one day being an American.

- I'm French and I'll keep my nationality. However, if during a travel I discover a country in wich I feel more comfortable than in France, I'll stay there. I don't dream to become American.
- But I prefer to speak with a real English accent when speaking in English. I really don't find the French accent fit with the English language.
I know I'll get a good accent anyway because I learn this sort of things very quickly (faster than grammar, for example).

If you speak English with a bad accent, native speakers will think you're slow.

I wish I had no accent at all while speaking English. I mean something that nobody asked you : by the way, where are you from ?
Although, I like my American friends, I don't dream of being an American. I'am a citizen of the world and I feel at home, more or less, wherever I go.

Tom
I know a lot of people who speak very quickly because they have an awful accent and by speaking fast they want to hide their mistakes.

>>>If you speak English with a bad accent, native speakers will think you're slow. <<<

I didn't say I have a bad accent. I have more or less the good tone and I can guess most of the time which syllable of the word is stressed. I Pronouce well the consonants but my problem is the vowels.
In fact, I think my accent is much closer to British than French, but I still have to progress. :)

""""I wish I had no accent at all while speaking English""""

Don't you think that is impossible though? What does a person who speaks English have to do to gain "no accent"? To me though it would sound very robotic and terrible.

A know a lot of women who like the French-English accent, French women who speak English sound very nice. Not slow at all, it depends on the persons own opinion.

>>>Don't you think that is impossible though? What does a person who speaks English have to do to gain "no accent"? To me though it would sound very robotic and terrible. <<<

One day I met a girl from ecuador who spent so much time speaking with people from every latino countries that she got no precisely identifiable accent because it was a mix. Far from being robotic, her accent was a patchwork of many peculiarities.
By the way, I also know a French girl who always move from the north to the south of France and vice versa for familial reasons and she's ended up getting the same kind of patchwork accent when she speaks French.

However, the Girl from Ecuador was said to have no accent by the latinos imigrant, while the French girl is said to have a souther accent by the northerner, and a northern accent by the southerner.

I would like to gain a kind of accent so that I do not have to be recognized as a foreigner. I do not like my Spanish accent when I speak English at all, although I know it woul be hard to part with it.

>> If you speak English with a bad accent, native speakers will think you're >> slow.

Don't generalise. I respect people who can't speak English perfectly just as I'd expect to be respected if I tried to communicate in a language I was learing.

"Generalise". So, South-African use the British spelling, Tremmert?

Chantal, I know several people who have lived all over the world, and they are happy doing that, or just staying where they currently live. And I know a few people who do not like to travel very far away from home, even though they could if they wanted to. THese people, my dad being one of them, are just content living their whole lives until death in their home town.

>> If you speak English with a bad accent, native speakers will think you're slow.

Well, this is tautologically true if you take the right definition of `bad accent.'

As long as your pronunciation is (1) easy to comprehend and (2) fluid, I think native speakers will consider it a good accent, even if it doesn't match the one they're used to hearing in their local region. English speakers are used to hearing a variety of accents. And it is often the case that a `foreign' accent which meets these two criteria will be regarded as pleasant, charming, or intriguing.

An accent only becomes unpleasant for me when I have to strain to understand what the person is trying to say, or when sentences are assembled so slowly and painstakingly that the speed of conversation falls below a certain acceptable level. When this happens, it's difficult not to treat the struggling speaker as somewhat `slow', even though you know that he or she is really quite intelligent.