My English Habit Forum

Post all your accent and pronunciation related questions here and I'll do my best to answer them. Maybe: You don't know what accent a speaker has. You want to know what someone says in a video or audio. You want to hear examples of a particular accent. With a bit of luck this post can become a useful resource for everyone.

Hi everyone, I thought I'd start a thread where everyone can share their most entertaining/funny/boring/dramatic stories about speaking English (or any other 2nd language for that matter). I'm sure we've all made fools or heros of ourselves at some point. Readers of the newsletter will be familiar with a few of my stories, but I'll share another one to start the thread off. It was Christmas Eve 2008 and day 1 of my first ever trip to Spain. My Spanish girlfriend and I had met in Glasgow where we both lived, so the language of communication between us had always been English. She invited me to spend Christmas with her and her family in Madrid, which for a boy with dreams of experiencing life all over the world was too good an opportunity to turn down. I had never studied Spanish at that time, so the sum total of my vocabulary were the words hola, gracias, adios, and pepino (I don't remember how I learned that last one). Of course, I couldn't really communicate, and I didn't know what was happening half the time, but smiling and nodding are pretty universal ways of showing you're having a good time. My girlfriend's granny however hadn't got the memo. Aside from the food, the faces, the bars, and the hangovers, my overriding memory of that trip is of sitting on the sofa next to 'abuela' as she spoke 'at' me for what seemed like hours and hours. All I could do was smile and nod, with only the occasional translation from my girlfriend helping to punctuate my bewilderment. Even after I started learning Spanish I had a few experiences similar to this one, but with a little bit of the language in your head already you can get a lot more out of the situation. Anyway, have you ever been in a similar situation?

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