>Having a mild accent really doesn't interfere with fluency. The big difference I think is what language you are thinking in while you speak. Real fluency means thinking as well as speaking in a language during conversation. Next best thing is having such a terrific vocabulary in a language grammatically similar to your own that you can simultaneously translate in your head without completely immersing ( works between Engish and Spanish - tougher going to German or Turkish where word order and grammar are a whole different ball game )True. I think in English when speaking it, as I do same in Spanish or Portuguese. Italian I find a tad more difficult as I do with French, simply because I am not as good in those two and my vocabulary is far smaller. I have no doubt it would change should I had the chance to live in those countries for a period of time.
>Accent really becomes and issue when you get to the tonal languages. Blow the tone and you've changed the word. Try to inflect a sentence to convey meaning and you just said something completely different. Flatten the tones and people have to listen very hard to understand you. ( when I speak Thai and I am tired, I just flatten everything out which the Thais think it really funny because that's the way Indian gangsters talk in Thai movies ) Keeping up the tone thing is for me the hardest thing. Just seems like a lot of work and I sound silly to my own ear <g> The grammar of Chinese, Thai, Lao etc is ridiculously simple compared to other langauges, but the spoken language is daunting.
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>I think Japanese is the coolest of the lot - grammar is no harder than Spanish, pronunciation is pretty easy and when you speak fast in a low voice you sound like Toshiro Mifune. ( not as much fun for Western women as to sound authentic you have to do kind of a Minnie Mouse thing <g> )I did learn some Japanese, grammar and all at some point so I appreciate your comments and also agree with them. I do not know Mandarin or Thai or tonal languages so I don't know the difficulty.
