European leaders who speak English

I meant that for Vinny's post at #17

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

I like the idea of such a scale. It's hard to measure the embarrassment of others versus your own, isn't it? I know a few French people who would say Sarkozy does come close, but in my opinion he's not quite in the same league. Realistically, I think Bush's most serious competition comes from Italy.

I agree with bjd that native speakers sometimes seem to have a harder time with foreign pronunciations because (I think) many of them don't think of a word as its written form, only as its pronounced form. (That's not a proper English sentence, but I don't know how else to say it.)

That being said, I didn't think the link in #12 was so bad. Of course he has a strong accent, stronger than most German speakers, but what he says is understandable, no?

I can't think of another national leader who comes close

Boris Yeltsin had his moments.

...but what he says is understandable, no?

HOW-men ee-sill-ABULLS are im-prah-PURL-ee stressed? I'd say that his English is understandable, but only with some difficulty. If I were with him for 10 or 15 minutes I might get used to the fact that his stresses are misplaced, and be able to figure out what he was saying. If he spoke something only once, though, I'd be in a bit of a fog: What did he say?

There was another YouTube clip demonstrating Oettinger's fluency in English on which he is introduced by a German whose English is easy to understand. The man introduces him, and says that Oettinger will make a statement and then answer a few questions. He spoke in English, then took questions in German. I don't speak German, so I may be mistaken, but even his German seemed to me to have a different accent than the German of the men asking him questions.

Here is that clip: Oettinger speaks English

Edited by NorthAmerican to add the link.

I saw that clip from the Davos conference showing the hold up while they waited for an interepreter for Zapatero, but I agree with whoever it was that said it isn't so much his poor language skills that should be criticized but the malfunctioning conference facilities. I felt sorry for that poor interpreter having to rush back and forth to translate both ways for Zapatero.
While Oettinger's English is not superb, I actually found his pronunciation more acceptable then Sarkozy's. As an EFL teacher who has lived abroad for many years, I have got used to foreigners speaking English, and this includes becoming familiar with the different pronunciation. But I got the impression that while Oettinger had difficulty with some of the English words, in most cases he made an effort to pronounce them in a , well, unGerman way (whether it proved successul or not is another matter). Incidentally, I found it easier to understand what he was saying when NOT looking at him speak, just listening. Sarkozy on the other hand, in that clip shown in one of the first posts, shows him not only reading word for word but more or less pronouncing the words as if he were speaking in French, making no effort at all to alter his pronuncitation.
My students all say, of course, that they find it much easier to speak English with (and to understand) another foreigner, be it from a different nationality than theirs, than to a native speaker.

Thanks for feedback.

My students all say, of course, that they find it much easier to speak English with (and to understand) another foreigner, be it from a different nationality than theirs, than to a native speaker.

I find that comment interesting, and surprising. (And I see that bjd said something similar at #14.)

All of my grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. When I was a child I lived in the same house as my maternal grandparents for about 15 years, so I heard accented English just about every day (we didn't live in the same flat). Neighbors included immigrant Greeks, Lebanese, Russians, Poles, and Italians, so I heard all kinds of accents from the parents or grandparents of my classmates/playmates. To this day I'm pretty good at understanding accented English.

When I tutored English to immigrants, though, I had many students who would say "I can't understand her!" when another student was speaking, even though I could understand almost all of them equally well. There were Mexican students who could not understand the English of Russians, and both the Mexicans and the Russians had great difficulty understanding the English of Japanese students. I wonder if it depends on where the people who are speaking English are from. It may be that Western Europeans have somewhat similar accents when speaking English, and thus can understand each other; the same might be true for Japanese, Koreans, and Tibetans speaking English together.

Yes, I think you are right NorthAmerican. When my students say they find the English of other foreigners easier to understand than a native speaker, I think most are referring to foreigners in Europe. I think they also meant they find it easier to communicate with another foreigner than with a native speaker because the language is foreign to both of them and they both inevitably speak a bit slower than some native speakers do, though I realize this is not the point you were raising.

I think a Pole would have a lot of problems understanding the English of a Japanese or a Tibetan or a Malaysian person, and vice versa.

You raise another interesting point, piaczka: how quickly or slowly we speak. My students told me that they understood me better than they understood most other native speakers of English, but they weren't aware of the fact that I spoke more slowly in the classroom than I would with my own friends or colleagues.

It just struck me that there may be another reason why foreigners learning English find it more easily understood when spoken by another foreigner. The person speaking may be stressing a wrong syllable, or pronouncing a vowel combination wrong (think of words like although, through, cough), but the person hearing it may understand the word because he once made the same error.

I was speaking French with a native of Madagascar and commented how much easier I found her to understand than most people from France. She told me that they speak French far more slowly than natives of France. Once I thought about it - that was definitely the reason.