True story: I was teaching geography to French freshman university students, and it took them a while to figure out that when I said "inundation" (with French pronunciation), I actually meant "inondation." Seriously kids, no imagination?? Compared to other Americans, my foreign accent is not even that strong (French people know I'm foreign but can't tell which country I come from).
Also true story: They seemed to understand the rest of the semester in spite of my certainly imperfect French, and French people have been generally kind and forgiving of my accent so long as I'm careful not to trigger memories from their traumatic high school English classes (i.e. just be humble and polite if you speak English with them!).
Conclusion:
ReplyDeleteFrench is hard.
Yeah... sorry about that. Not trying to be rude over here, but strong accents really DO make foreigners unintelligible.
ReplyDeleteOne the plus side, you can always learn Spanish!
Don't you mean "has to BE just right?" Feels like a word is missing here.
ReplyDeletethat the joke
DeleteTrue story: I was teaching geography to French freshman university students, and it took them a while to figure out that when I said "inundation" (with French pronunciation), I actually meant "inondation." Seriously kids, no imagination?? Compared to other Americans, my foreign accent is not even that strong (French people know I'm foreign but can't tell which country I come from).
ReplyDeleteAlso true story: They seemed to understand the rest of the semester in spite of my certainly imperfect French, and French people have been generally kind and forgiving of my accent so long as I'm careful not to trigger memories from their traumatic high school English classes (i.e. just be humble and polite if you speak English with them!).