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 will depend on how your native language compares to the language you’re learning. Spanish people also tend to have strong accents when speaking english, which indicates that the languages just sound too different.
I’m a native portuguese speaker (from Portugal), and that means I find some languages easier to get the accent of, even if I don’t speak them (greek, for example, is quite easy, they mostly have the same sounds, so with training I could speak it pretty well), whereas others are basically impossible. Also, this doesn’t need to go both ways – if a language A has more sounds than language B, it’s much easier to go from A to B than the opposite. Portuguese people can generally speak Spanish quite well, whereas the opposite is just not true – it just so happens that portuguese is phonetically more difficult. This also applies to english – portuguese people, on average, have a much subtler accent when speaking english than spaniards.
Slavic speakers (polish, ukrainians, etc.) are very good with both romance languages and english, in my experience, for example, whereas the opposite is just not true.
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