3 ms·
How long have you been living in Britain, for people to think you're British from your accent? I started pretty much the same way, trying to make sense of C++
by 1_player 12y ago
How long have you been living in Britain, for people to think you're British from your accent?
I started pretty much the same way, trying to make sense of C++ and VB manuals when I was young and I think I have pretty good reading and writing skills now, although a native speaker can notice English is not my primary language.
Spoken English is still an obstacle for me, I moved to London a year ago, I got a pretty good pronunciation, but I still find it much harder to convey my thoughts, compared to writing them. And I'm trying hard to lose my Italian accent, luckily it's not as pronounced as the stereotypical one.
Though I have to admit I've never been a good speaker, not even in my native language.
- jdiez17 12y agoAbout a year now. My spoken English was pretty rough back then, but I started copying the sounds I heard when other people spoke, and it seems to have helped. Yeah, it's a lot harder to convey thoughts by speech in a foreign language, and I think it's because you have to make a conscious effort to find the right words or expressions. It's like getting data from RAM (foreign language) or from the L1 cache (native). It gets better though, with practice.
- srathbun 12y agoI would guess you aren't thinking in the language in question. You are translating your native language sentence into the appropriate english sentence on the fly. To use a programming analogy, it is like writing Haskell code as if it was C. Because you aren't thinking functionally, for every imperative step the C code in your head takes you have to translate it to some sort of functional analog. You can get through it, but it is slower, and looks "funny" to a "native".