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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1765 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 31, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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What's the worst-sounding foreign accent in English? Right now I think it's Mandarin, but I am open to suggestions.

French or Dominican-English.

The French have the thing where there is zero effort at accent, even among French who are absolutely fluent in grammatically perfect English. To be fair, there is a certain kind of Englishman who is exactly the same in French.

You just made me realize that I have literally never heard a French person (or other native Romance language speaker, for that matter. The germanics' native pronunciation gives them a leg up and the Asians actually try) even attempt to pronounce my simple, white bread American name correctly, despite them presumably hearing it constantly in American media their whole lives. Which makes me wonder why I, as an American, bother putting so much effort into shit like that. Nobody else seems to be extending the courtesy back to us except for the Asians, who ironically probably have the hardest time actually making the appropriate mouth sounds.

pronounce my simple, white bread American name correctly, despite them presumably hearing it constantly in American media their whole lives

I think you might be overestimating the importance of hearing specific but rarely used words when it comes to pronouncing them. When your native language lacks specific syllables, it can be quite difficult to incorporate them without practise. This isn't particularly helped by English basically having zero logic when it comes to knowing how to pronounce a word you aren't familiar with.

I have an Irish friend whose surname I'm completely unable to pronounce correctly even after hearing it plenty of times. The syllables that a native speaker hears don't map 1:1 to the syllables that I hear (or even know) and no amount of listening is going to help with that. And then there's things like V vs W and names like Vicky vs Vicki which I hear as exactly the same but apparently consistently mispronounced (even after the person tried to teach me how!).

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