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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It’s worth noting that when someone in India learns English or someone from the Democratic Republic of the Congo learns French or someone from Bolivia learns Spanish that they’re not doing it so that they can speak and understand people from England or France or Spain, they’re doing it primarily so that they can speak with other Indians / Congolese / Bolivians who might not share their hyper-local home language. So the most important part is learning it in a way that’s consistent with other people in the area, which means learning it in a way with common stress patterns and consonant pronunciations with most of the local spoken home languages.
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