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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stressed in syllables are distributed differently in different languages. english is a stressed based language, meaning that there are regular stressed (intonated, more emphasis) intervals, while the unstressed parts lose a bit of emphasis (to pay peter you must take from paul…when we stress the second A on banana, we also diminish the first and last “a”). spanish is a syllabic based language, where stress is generally distributed equally and then when its not, they indicate stress with an accent mark.
in english, if you wanted to use accent marks, they would be EVERYWHERE. so when people come from syllabic based languages and learn english, they have to also learn that stress is NOT distributed equally. this is incredibly difficult part of learning english. in english, stress follows these give/take trend inside of words with syllables, as well as inside of phrases/sentences. in english, we dont typically stress articles, prepositions, the “to” in infinitives, most pronouns nor conjunctions. so this one characteristic of english can translate, pun intended, into a wide variety of strange sounds for a native speaker because the second language speaker is really struggling to get the rhythm of english stress distribution.
to the other differences…think of languages like gyms….each gym has a different set of machines to exercise…when you learn a new language, you are exercising different muscles using different machines. your tongue is a muscle. when you grow up learing your native language, your tongue exercises the same muscles and your ears are trained to those sounds and nuances. when you start speaking a new language, you are having to force your tongue to do things it hasnt been doing for its whole existence. this creates small nuanced deviations from the sound of a native speaker.
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