Why native accents frustrate language learners

Our own Dunning-Kruger style bubble of “learned” language is something that can hold us back as learners. It’s also something that can negatively impact relationships with the very people who might hold the key to unlocking higher fluency.

I had a conversation recently that triggered two interesting personal reactions:

To be perfectly honest: annoyance that someone had been so rude to the person that shared the story.

Reflective guilt: where actually I had been guilty of a similar thing.

He had been criticised by someone learning English as having a “strange” English accent.

For the record, he is a highly educated person with an accent that would be completely at home on TV, whether in a documentary or on the news. He also has qualifications for teaching English.

IMHO his English is always of a very high quality and he uses far stricter grammar than most people.

So after the annoyance hearing how someone had made him feel awkward due to his accent... I started reflecting.

I remember when I first started trying to communicate with people in the South West of France I had a terrible time trying to understand what was being said.

This was partly down to a different pronunciation from what I had ever been taught but, more honestly, down to the fact that I just wasn't very good at understanding naturally spoken French.

I remember explaining to someone that the South West accent was a complete mystery to me.

Great, so that gives me an excuse... somebody else’s problem.

Except no, really it's something that is my issue and not something that is going to be fixed by me complaining about it.

When people learn a language in large groups this effect can become even more entrenched.

If you all learn a version of a language heavily based on interaction with fellow non-native speakers, you will all learn your collective version of that language, usually with some fairly comic creations.

For example, imagine 90 students in an English school all learning Italian and speaking it non-stop with each other. They all study hard and are overachievers.

The first Italian person they meet in real life could easily trigger the reaction:

“This Italian person can’t even speak Italian properly.”

Examples of creative shared mistakes with English students learning French include classics like the pronunciation of “beaucoup” without any distinction between “coup” and “cul”.

Or people learning English inventing words that simply do not exist in English at all, such as the infamous “monthses”.

When we find ourselves critiquing the “accent” or the “correctness” of a native speaker, it is often a limitation in our own capability and comprehension.

We mistake our classroom-taught bubble and conversations with fellow learners for reality.

Remember when you next have a conversation with someone that has a “strange” accent that you don’t understand, it may be your future CEO or a critical client.

Practise, prepare and make the accent familiar but also, for the sake of emotional intelligence, do not go ad hominem.

#ExecutiveEnglish #ExecutiveCoaching #LanguageLearning #EmotionalIntelligence