I am very concious of the fact that I have an accent here in Chile. Try as I might, I will never speak Spanish like a native (especially a Chilean, which I hear is a good thing). But I do pride myself on the fact that my accent is actually very good for a gringa. I can roll my r's with the best of them and I can even get just the right amount of hhhughhh in my silent, but not so silent, J. I do know there are words that cause me problems and it makes it hard for others to understand what I am trying to say. This was expected. What I didn't expect was to encounter problems with my English accent. For goodness' sake, I learned English in the midwest. We don't have an accent in the midwest. Midwest English is universally understood by everyone. Everyone apparently, except for the South American's. If this had been brought to my attention just once, I would have thought that it was an isolated event. But since I have been in Chile, three seperate people have told me, in varying ways, that I am difficult to understand when speaking English. Who would have thought that the natives would be more forgiving of my Spanglish?
The first time someone mentioned that I was hard to understand was about 2 weeks ago. A friend of ours was having a party and we were delighted to be invited. The guest list was varied and there were people from the U.S., Chile and Bolivia. I was introduced to a cousin from Bolivia and her English is like my Spanish - passable but obviously not as comfortable for her as her native language. We did our best, with both of us speaking more Spanish the English and we were getting by pretty well. But then she asked me a question I just couldn't answer in Spanish. I just didn't have the vocablulary to even attempt it, so I answered her in English. In return I got a blank stare. Ok, so I say it again, trying different words to make it a bit simpler. This time, she turns to my friend and states "I cannot understand a word she is saying". My girlfriend repeats the same thing I just said, still in English, with her Texas accent and lo and behold, she understood every word. Amazing. She understood it through the Texas drawl. This happened for the rest of the night...I needed a translator. To translate my English into English!
The next times I happened to be out and about. When people hear you speaking English (and they hear me because I am usually talking to Stinkerbell), and they speak English (even if it is only two words) they tend to want to practice with you...whether you want to or not. I don't blame them. They don't have a lot of opportunity to practice here as 95% of the population does not speak even those two words of English. So as much as I want to practice my Spanish every chance I get, I try to be accomodating and play along for awhile.
I was at Easy and I stopped a gentleman to ask where to find an item. From my Spanish, he knew I was not native and so took the opportunity to speak to me in English. But we were getting nowhere fast. Seeing as I only had an hour before I had to pick up MadHatter, I tried it another way. I said the Spanish, and then the English - Necesito una lampara, I need a lamp. Funny how he understood my spanish accent, but not the English. So he could have pointed me in the direction of Aisle 12 and that would have been that. But before pointing me in the right direction, he felt it his duty to correct my pronunciation of the English word. He repeated to me, slowly and as if I was just learning the language, the word lamp. You mean a Laahhm. My turn to look confused. Did he just tell me that the way to pronounce lamp is like llama (without the a at the end and not the way the spanish pronounce it with the ll being y). I said, "Yes, a lamp"...and he once again says "laahhm", just like my Spanish teacher does when she is trying to correct me. I finally got to Aisle 12 and got great bedside table lamps so it was all worth it in the end. And then the same thing happened when the woman behind me in line at checkout tried talking to me. We started off in English and I knew this was not going well when each time she figured out what I was saying she would say, "Oh...you mean..." and repeat exactly what I said. I wanted to say, "Isn't that what I just said?" but I like living here and don't really want to make the entire English speaking population angry with me.
I think my problem is that I speak too clearly. You see, I tend to pronounce each word, letter for letter, especially when talking to someone for whom English is a second language. I take more care talking to them and I choose my words differently. I make sentences simple and don't go around using high falutin words to sound impressive. And I tend to slow down a bit - but for me that doesn't mean much, since I speak very, very fast. But since it is not the way I usually speak, it tends to be unnatural and perhaps a bit less understandable. So I am going to take a lesson from the Chileans themselves - I am going to do what they do when speaking to a foreigner, and that is not change a single thing. When talking to me, someone they know has a tenuous grasp on the language at best, they still drop the ending of every other word, use slang that only a Chilean would know and merge 2 or 3 words into one completely unrecognizable new one. I will just speak the way I am used to and if they can't understand me, I will switch to Spanglish. At least then I don't have an accent.
