Why is it so difficult to learn the proper accent in multiple languages?

voots?

Our Norwegian driller would tell us to put the sub out the V-door like: Put the soob oot the wee door
Hours of hilarity

De voots, nerb. Veyr Leetu Rad Raïdinkut mat de Bik Bet Vohlf.

iviehoff, yes. I shortened the story. I heard a voiced bilabial fricative myself, and explained it to the rest of the class during a break when they were complaining about the "wee". She didn't need native-level English pronunciation, but she needed to have knowledge of the difference between English v, English w, and Turkish v.

She would do the same kind of thing with grammar, saying that one Turkish tense was just like the English present perfect, when she didn't have a good grasp of the English present perfect, and so on.

In the Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten writes about the difficulty of teaching English to Yiddish speakers. (Remember, he was not trained in linguistics.)

One thing was that the first English many encountered was in the Yiddish press, which used a lot o f English loanwords.
>Since these words were spelled in YIddish, their pronunciation was necessarily determined by the pronunciational aspects of Yiddish--and the habituated reflexes of the Jewish tongue and larynx. And so the proud new patriots swiftly enlarged their vocabularies with such useful, everyday words as
>vindaw................window
>stritt cah..............street car
>sobvay................subway
>tex.......................tax
>sax......................sex
>Let me point out that one reason for these aural transformations lay in the way many Jews pronounced any language--German, French, or Yiddish itself.

He goes on to give a whole range of other sound transformations, such as
>'We went to Willie's wedding" is vivified into "Ve vent to Villie's vaddink."

De voots, nerb. Veyr Leetu Rad Raïdinkut mat de Bik Bet Vohlf.

I burst out laughing, VinnyD; thanks. And yes, I mistakenly wrote "the voots" when my grandmother could never pronounce the th of English, so "de" is closer; I might have tried "dih."

Both you and nutrax have brought back to my ear the sounds I heard in my youth.

I have become fluent in Japanese but whenever an English word comes up in conversation, I always pronounce it in English.
This just confuses the people I am talking to and they have no idea what I said.
I have always believed there is no point in communicating unless you are understood but I keep breaking my own rule.

Wow heaps of info in there!

You guys obviously know a lot more about language than i do. It makes for an interesting read. :)

De voots, nerb. Veyr Leetu Rad Raïdinkut mat de Bik Bet Vohlf. (#53)

I spent days trying to decipher this phrase. I got it all except "nerb". WTF is "nerb"?

Penny just dropped. Nerb refers to TT member n_rb in #50. DOH!

I met a Brazilian woman this morning (a friend of a friend). We were speaking Portuguese then another friend of mine arrived and she switched to English. It struck us both that she had a noticeable Polish accent when speaking English. It turns out that her husband is Polish and she learned English from his family here. A number of people have asked her if she's Polish but she didn't realise until recently that she had a Polish accent (she also showed other signs of Polish English in her grammar, such as omitting articles etc.).

Polish and Portuguese sound surprisingly similar given how distantly related they are. They both contain a large frequency of sh, ch and zh sounds. Where I live, there's a significant portuguese community. I don't speak portuguese but I speak Polish badly and have spent much time in Poland. At first hearing, I frequently mistake spoken Portuguese for Polish - until I get closer and realise I can't understand a word!

I wonder if the similarity between the sounds of Portuguese and Polish are reflected in similar accents in English as a second language.

Interesting -- I speak Polish but Portuguese used to be one of those languages I could never identify when I used to listen on shortwave radio, scrolling through foreign stations. I never linked the sibilant sounds in the two languages.