Accents!

[Communisto]

This whole everyone having the same avatar thing is starting to really make things difficult on CFC.

 

[TheLastOne36]

someone said to me that polish people even those born in america and lived there all there lives have an accent, and i have a thick accent. (i was born in poland and lived in poland for most of my life though)

 

[jeps]

i was told as of yesterday that I have a weird accent in hebrew.

 

[gallego]

someone said to me that polish people even those born in america and lived there all there lives have an accent, and i have a thick accent. (i was born in poland and lived in poland for most of my life though)

This probably isn't true for all cases, but in some it is, probably because those people grow up in Polish immigrant communities and only spoke Polish until they entered school. I know people who grew up in immigrant communities like this (Polish, Portuguese, etc.) and some of them do have a very slight accent in English. I wouldn't call it a "thick" accent though. If they go to American school, they learn English perfectly or 99.9%.

 

[Hehehe]

I'm not a linguist but I've read up on this stuff and I am led to believe that it is not 100% impossible to learn a new accent or language perfectly as an adult, just difficult and very time-consuming and requiring some deep willpower. Either way, you won't be fooling local people without several years of practice if a new language, maybe less with the same language but different accent.

I suppose that depends on what language you are trying to learn. I live in Finland, and Finnish is quite difficult language. Immigrants (except for Hungarians, Japanese and maybe Estonians) just don't seem to learn perfect Finnish. For example, there was one french guy, who had been living in Finalnd for about 20 years. Yet if he spoke to a Finn, all he needed to say was one sentence and they would ask him where is he from.

I believe this is because these languages simply have so different pronounciation and stuff, as Finnish is Finno-Ugric language (like Hungarian and Estonian) while English is Germanic language and French is Romanic language.