LOL

I think my Russian teachers understood, though, since they spent so much time working with us to get us to pronounce some Russian vowels and other sounds correctly. I learned them fairly quickly, because I analyzed how they were produced with the mouth and tongue. So, I helped other students get it, as well.

My Russian teachers were really pleased to be able to pronounce "W" as Americans do. They eagerly adopted the correct pronunciation, once they understood how the sound was made.

and I taught them how to pronounce many English sounds.

It was still difficult for them to use many of them in words, much the same way that the French "r" is difficult for me to pronounce correctly in a word. Same with ü and ö.

It all comes down to practice.

I'm able to pronounce Müller correctly, but it feels a bit of an affectation to say it the German way when talking to English speakers.

It's like listening to Giada on the Food Network say "ricotta". I know she was born in Italy and her family are all fluent Italian speakers, but she still comes off as sounding sort of affected when she uses Italian terms.

My grandparents and their siblings were from Italy and they pronounced it like "rigaught". They rarely prounounced vowels at the end of a lot of a lot of words, but I wasn't sure if that was just a dialect.

But I think that's pretty close.

L'accent de canard.

I suppose we are a bit nasal. Then again, most French people don't pronounce English as well as I do their language. I would tell Macron, hey, why don't we just speak French (after telling him how genuinely awesome he is).

It's interesting how different it is speaking French; if you want to sound like them, your chest and lungs need to get involved, at least mine do.

of course, but neither do people scowl when I'm speaking. My Spanish pronunciation is good, because I learned it as a child growing up with Spanish-speaking kids. My Russian pronunciation is quite good, but I don't get to speak it very often.

and everyone wants to speak it with them. When I was in France in the late 70s-early 80s, you were pretty lost without their language. They're still a lot less likely to speak English than, say, Germans, but they're way ahead of where they were.

told me that Americans and Spanish speakers stretch their mouths too wide to the side for French. His suggestion was to pucker my lips as though I meant to kiss someone. It really helped for the sounds I struggled with.

Oddly enough I never had trouble with the French velar "r" but only with sounds and rhythms that got lost with my lips stretched for Spanish or English.

for 2 years when I was 8-10. I did not speak the language very well but hearing the language being spoken around me
I learned to recognize and understand pronunciation of the language and I do well at pronouncing German words. I do well at interpreting what a German with a heavy accent is saying in English because I am aware of their own pronunciation in their own language and can make the connection.

between high school and college with native speaker teachers, but I still can't understand a damn thing that Henry Kissinger says. I would be better able to understand him speaking German than English.

But, Kissinger was the only native German speaker I ever had trouble understanding. It must be just him.

And the next thing you know, they're stealing our nuclear wessels!

Polish is very phonetic, much, much more than English -but Polish letters don't map to English ones as a rule. Growing up in a community of 1st and 2nd generations of Americans this wasn't a problem. But most Anglophones I've encountered seem to think they can pronounce - and spell- Polish names any way they want. In college I used to answer to the 3rd name on the roll. I ended up adopting my husband's surname when I got married so people in the US could pronounce it.

If you have both, you can pronounce almost anything. I'm in a different (usually European) country for work every day, and I am always expected to communicate in the language of the country I'm in, whether it's Dutch, Catalan, Russian, Swiss German, Italian, French, etc. etc. I'd feel like an idiot if I came across like a tourist with a phrase book he bought the day before, like the Chevy Chase character in France in National Lampoon's "European Vacation." I work with these people practically every week. I can't come to their countries, work with them, eat with them, and expect them to listen to me butcher their languages for decades on end.

Here in Germany, when you take a train over to Holland and get a German conductor, their attempts to pronounce the Dutch "ui" are painful to the ear, although they must be there on a daily basis, and the train ALWAYS passes through the city of Duisburg. The same goes for the average Frenchman pronouncing German or Flemish. But some get it right. I make a real effort to do that, and I know I succeed at least part of the time. When Swedes I don't know tell me that if I spend a couple more years in Stockholm, no one will ever hear that I'm originally from Norway, or when I'm in Holland and Dutchmen tell me that if I spend another year there, I will have lost my Afrikaans accent completely, or when I'm in Barcelona, and the locals tell me that my Catalan has almost completely lost its Mallorcan accent, then I know my pronunciation is at least halfway convincing.

The funniest thing was the first time I was Russia. I knew Russian, of course, but almost exclusively from literature and my classes in college. When I spoke, they looked at me in a funny way. Our friend, a German who was a news correspondent for German radio there, had a Russian girlfriend. She explained to me why everyone must have been staring at me. She said my pronunciation was fine, but my Russian sounded like I had gone to sleep in 1898 and just woken up yesterday. I knew no Soviet era slang because I had never had anyone speak it to me, never watched Russian TV, never spent any serious time with ordinary living Russians except for occasional embassy staff or TACC guys in Washington, and even then only on a superficial basis. The people on the street in Moscow thought I was some kind of modern Rip van Winkle. One asked me outright if I had had a nice sleep these past 100 years.

He got picked on about his accent and being an extremely good singer he worked very hard at losing his accent and now unless he gets very excitable or angry you can hear no accent in his voice at all. My brother has always been interested in the German language and now being a German consulate he has to speak it very well. You would not be able to tell he is not German when he speaks it. I can pronounce words given to me but I only know just barely enough that if I got lost on the streets of Berlin I could get myself not lost.

US in the 40s and 50s. So, what conversational language and idioms we learned dated to that period. It wasn't until I began hearing you get Russian in normal conversation that I got the hang of current speech norms. We learned more or less formal Russian in classes. We had to learn the rest on our own.

It's all very rusty now, from lack of use. I can still get along OK, but have to think a bit to compose sentences before saying much.

...but when someone who isn't a native English speaker butchers a language, we're all expected to either pretend not to notice, or to gush about how charming their accent is. It's a double standard. When I'm speaking Spanish, I attempt to pronounce all the words correctly because otherwise my listener would have trouble understanding me. When I'm speaking English and I use a Spanish word, I don't bother to pronounce it correctly because most likely the person I'm speaking with would be thrown off by my switching back and forth, and on top of that I think it sounds pretentious.

One exception though, I love it when someone attempts to speak German and "butchers" the language, because it usually is quite charming. Especially French and English native speakers. We're afraid to speak English because of the dreaded "th", so if somone else butchers ze English language some people will always point out that fact. It's almost like being homophobic because you're afraid of your own homosexual desires.

About pronouncing names: Most Müllers probably don't really care if they are called Muller, Moller, Maller, Meller or Miller. Just like German "Michael" (which is probably difficult to pronounce correctly for some native English speakers) is okay with "Mike", and "Marion" might actually prefer "Marry". "Heinrich" is "Henry" etc. I'd say the average American is very charming compared to the average German, so maybe most people are distracted at first and don't even realize someone just called them Steven Miller instead of Stefan Müller.

Thanks for pretending not to notice the butchering in this post...

Of course, they were English lol.

Both my sis and I never had problems with languages. I enjoy learning them.

I think most Americans don't want to make the effort. That's a shame.