I truly don’t understand accents. My only experience is as an American learning Spanish; it was stressed pretty hard to use the Spanish accent – that had at least equal weight with confugating verbs. I’m sure that my Spanish accent is absolutely crappy and I’m easily identifiable as an American, but as far as I’m aware English to Spanish stresses the accent.
What confuses me is when people from, say, India, speak English, they often have a strong accent. They stress odd syllables and pronounce letters differently than they “should.” I know it’s difficult in some cases to form sounds from another language due to them just not existing in the original language, but…like English doesn’t roll it’s Rs, yet I do when I speak Spanish (again, badly I’m sure)?
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I’m a former Spanish teacher. There are both similar/different sounds made in different languages. In Spanish, all the sounds made in the language are also used in English, with maybe the exception of rolling the R’s. In English, there are quite a few sounds that are not commonly made in Spanish. So it stands to reason that if you grew up speaking English, you’ll have an easier time learning the accent than someone who grew up speaking Spanish who learned English. An added difficulty is the difference in syntax, (the way/order of words in which sentences are constructed), and also English grammar and spelling follow less-consistent rules, and in Spanish they’re quite consistent and intuitive. The spelling is also phonetic. so for native English speakers, spanish is a pretty accessible language to learn. It already all makes sense. English learners have a much greater difficulty because English is more complicated, less consistent, and all the grammar rules have exceptions.
Other languages can also have certain inflections or emphases that are necessary to communicate accurately in their native tongue, but aren’t necessary in English. They may retain the emphasis they put on the word (in their native tongue) to the translated word in English, because it contextually makes sense to them. It feels necessary when speaking.
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