> Now for German, you can speak any of the awful dialects natively and it's fine. But never, never dare Hochdeutsch with with a _foreign_ accent as people will

> Now for German, you can speak any of the awful dialects natively and it's fine. But never, never dare Hochdeutsch with with a _foreign_ accent as people will make a point of not understanding you! Because dropping a umlaut suddenly makes an entire sentence impossible to parse! Well, for Germany it's not about the language, it's about the fact that making any mistake that gives away that German is not your native language suddenly makes you a stupid immigrant of lower education in the eyes of the most of the natives.