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It's possible for Americans to do the correct vowels, though. We have most of them elsewhere in the language. I started learning Romance languages fairly youn
by asveikau 7y ago
It's possible for Americans to do the correct vowels, though. We have most of them elsewhere in the language. I started learning Romance languages fairly young and at my peak fluency [a little rusty these days] I had people telling me I sounded near-native in Spanish.
Personally the thing that bothers me most about American accents with these languages is failure to make diphthongs out of adjacent vowels. An American accent will stretch a Romance diphthong out into lengthy syllables. For example in this audio link above, the speaker says hodie has "HOE-dee-ay". I speculate someone more used to speaking a Romance language would say /'hodje/, two syllables. (I note English wiktionary has it as 3 syllables. Not sure what an ancient Roman would do.)
In any case I think a lot of the confusion is orthographic in nature. An English speaker is used to an <e> being /i/. It's not that they can't do an /e/ sound if they tried. A lot of people in the US also have very little real exposure, eg. we have language classes in school where making a real attempt to drop our accents and interact on a level plane with natives is never even seriously considered, it's just a place to hold you in a desk and fill out worksheets.
- learc83 7y ago>it's just a place to hold you in a desk and fill out worksheets. The US education system is incredibly diverse--as is the US as a whole. That may the case in some schools, but it's certainly not the case everywhere. My southern high school was suburbun/almost rural and had enough kids on free lunch to qualify as a low income, but my German classes were extremely intensive. The French and Spanish classes were no joke either. And in much of the country almost everyone will interact with native Spanish speakers fairly often.