Funny, I also speak English with an accent too. :-)

I started with German in High School with a teacher who grew up in the Texas Hill Country with a grandmother who absolutely refused to speak English. Understood it, could read and write it, but refused to speak it.

Before German, I'd taken Spanish in school and was pretty good with that and can still understand quite a bit, but every time I try to speak Spanish, German comes out.


>I think accent (in general) is in the eye of the beholder. I speak English with an accent but it never hindered my life.
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>The french high school teacher in our town earned many accolades; one of them, IIRC, was the Teacher of the Year award. She taught both of my girls. Recently I asked my older daughter if the teacher had a good or bad french pronunciation and my daughter said "horrible" :) but then she added that the teacher knew her subject very well and knew how to teach.
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>Maybe time for you to take a refresher course in German :)
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>>Once upon a time, I spoke German well enough (except for my unfortunate American accent) and it was always fun to watch movies that had someone speaking German with subtitles. I start laughing because what they said and what the subtitles said were quite often MUCH different.
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>>French, unfortunately, is not a language the my mouth works well with. I guess it's because when English was mugging all the other languages for stray syntax and such it threw out a lot of the French pronunciations. Kept the words, but just had to change the way it sounded.
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>>>>OTOH French is too pretty a language for some things. During the end credits for the movie "District 13" some guy starts rapping in French. That just doesn't work, I started howling with laughter. Like a 5 year old niece trying, and failing, to use potty mouth ;)
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>>>You got me at "beautiful french woman" :). Rapping in any language does not sound appealing.
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>>>About a week ago my wife and I went to see a french movie, one of the movies of the Boston Jewish film festival. The title of the movie is The Art Dealer (L'Antiquaire); very good film. But I was getting lost in the plot several times when trying to understand without reading the subtitles (which is way too early for my level). Now, also, when I watch a french movie, in Netflix, I am so focused on trying to understand the words that often times stop following the plot :). They call it "obsessive-compulsive" :)