People often tell me that I don't have an accent when I speak German. Which I guess I don't, but honestly, this is simply the result of early exposure rather than of some incredible mastery of the language. Don't get me wrong, my German's pretty good; but I ain't a native speaker, and sometimes it would actually do a lot more good if people could hear this!
Because like any non-native speaker, I say things differently. I make grammatical mistakes and use the wrong verb prefix, all the little slips that one expects and forgives, or possibly doesn't even notice, when the speaker has an accent. But without an accent, there's a bizarre discord: the person sounds German, so there's no reason to expect any errors at all -- which means the smallest misstep comes streaking out like the wrong key played on a piano.
So it turns out, all not-having-an-accent really does is trade the vague indignity of sounding foreign for the much greater indignity of sounding, well, stupid! Or just appallingly weird, as when I use the wrong word for something and tell my hairdresser that my "roots" are growing out. (The word, in case you care to know, is Ansatz.)
I often feel compelled, therefore, to explicitly tell people that German is not my first language, especially in situations involving a barrage of technical jargon, i.e. from the insurance guy. But since this often doesn't help, it leaves me wondering just how much our perception is apparently fooled by what we hear. If she sounds like a German, she must be a German. For goodness' sake, my French teacher speaks flawlessly fabulous, colloquial, fluent, richly-vocabularied German; but because she also has a slight French accent, the other people in my class tell me that my German is better. Which it most certainly is not, if they stopped to listen to the words and not just the sound.
But I can no more seriously affect an American accent when speaking German than I can take on a German one in English. It's just how I talk!
Weird, what you can still discover after over 2.5 years abroad.
1 comment:
At least you're not sounding like you're from Constantinople or Timbuktu!
Do you think people treat you better than if you had an accent? Do they treat you more fairly?
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