Thursday, January 14, 2010

Acento

As I've begun to learn to speak Spanish better I was very eager to have Manolo tell me what type of accent I had when I speak Spanish. Did I speak Spanish like a Mexicana with all the harsh sounds and Spanglish words? Did I speak Spanish like a person from Valencia, Spain with their beautiful lisping? (I do try really hard to make all my "c" and "z"s into "ths" because people from Valencia have my favorite accent). Or did I sound like a Sevillano with their bad habit of dropping the "s" off the end of all words and not lisping when they speak?

One day towards the end of Manolo's stay I asked him what accent I had. He looked at me quizzically and I explained the different types of accents and hoped that he would tell me that I had a nice accent like people from Valencia. His response: "You have an American accent. You speak Spanish like an American". Darn it. I guess I forgot that even if you do a pretty good job of speaking a foreign language, that you have an accent for forever (or at the very least a very, very long time). If a Japanese person lives in Texas for 2 years they don't automatically have a Southern twang. They may say a few Texan expressions but they always have a Japanese accent.