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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try writing with your non-dominant hand? you can do it but it looks crappy. because your dominant hand got all the attention on how to write when you were young it does a better job, faster. your vocal skills are similar. as a kid you practiced English over and over and over again, learning all the sounds associated with it and how to pronounce them. a personal example, my wife has English as her 3rd language, but learned young enough to only have a very slight accent (though she learned British English before American), when we were still dating i said “Dubai” as an american and got corrected over and over with “it’s not ‘Dubai’, it’s ‘Dubai’.” after a little while and lots of practice I could finally hear it. it is “Dₕubai”. that D with a faint trailing “hu” doesn’t exist in English, so i could literally not hear it until exposed to Sanskrit based languages for a while. in Hindi W and V have large overlap due to both not existing, in Japanese the same is true with R and L (that’s where a lot of the racist stereotypes come from). Everyone learns all the rules of their childhood languages really well, but then as adults end up using the rules of their native languages on other languages that it doesn’t apply to.
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