European leaders who speak English

#8 --

There's a story that Mme de Gaulle was asked at a luncheon in England what she was looking forward to now that her husband was retiring. "A penis" she replied. The General spoke to her "It's pronounced hhhappiness, chérie."

Not true, of course.

It's likely that George Papandreou's English is pretty good. He was born in Minnesota to an American mother. His father later became a US citizen (and chair of the economics department at UC Berkeley), renouncing that citizenship and returning to Greece after the colonels fell from power. George was educated in the US and at LSE.

Q : Do you speak english, mr. president ?

A : Yes and how !

The brand new german commissioner :
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWB5oyIjSF0]

#12: Oettinger's English is a good example of what makes it difficult for native speakers of any language to understand someone who learns it as a second or third language. In that particular clip, he stresses the wrong syllable in several words, making them almost unintelligible. I tried another YouTube clip on which Oettinger can be heard speaking some English, and when I heard him say "comity" I did not understand what he was talking about. When he said the word again a minute later, I realized that he was saying "committee," and it made sense.

#13 This is an interesting point. Other non-native speakers certainly understand each other better than native speakers trying to understand a non-native. The native speaker expects words to be pronounced in a certain way and simply doesn't understand a word if he expects a specific pronunciation. People who have learned or are learning a language may be more flexible in their understanding because they are not always sure how a word will be pronounced, especially in non-phonetic languages like English or French.

I say "non-phonetic" to mean languages that are not always pronounced as they are written -- this is probably the wrong term for it.

What did Merkel say in #7? "You can say...." something?

#7 This is not always the case. Zapatero has embarrassed us many times because of his inability to speak English:

He delayed a conference because he was the only one there who required an interpreter (article in Spanish)
Link Name

There are many jokes in Spain about him and his "perfect" English
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#16 -- Zapatero's English can't be as embarrassing as was GW Bush's Spanish. Or GW Bush's English, for that matter.

And it's not the Spanish who should be embarrassed by the incident described in #16 -- it's the people who botched the planning for the conference.

#16 I think GWBush set a very high score on the "national embarrassment scale". Offhand, I can't think of another national leader who comes close -- although, give them enough time. He did have 8 years to practice.