English

I get "turned on" when I hear the Swedish word "stjaert" (which means both "bottom" and "tail", as in a dog´s tail). The trouble is - it´s hard to pronounce (the Swedish language is hard to pronounce, generally speaking, unless you are born a Swede and therefore learn to do it right early).

My wife, Thi, for example - she is from Vietnam. She has learned what a lot of Swedish words mean, and she has learned a lot of the Swedish grammar, in just four years. But I still often can´t make head or tails of what she is trying to say, because she pronounces the (correct) words *so* insanely (to my ears). Thi will try to say one word, but what I hear is a completely different word which she says "by mistake", due to her atrocious pronunciation. Have any of you had that problem in different languages than Swedish? Understanding what an immigrant is trying to say with atrocious pronunciation?

Thi and I actually sometimes get into fights because she gets mad at me when I fail to understand what she thinks she is saying so clearly. At times she even threatens to pack her bags and leave me!

@galt54,
how's that? Hasn't Sweden free language courses for immigrants? And if I had understood that right, even courses in Swedish culture to make it easier for them to integrate in the Swedish society? You are the husband. Can't you send her to school?

Just because of that criminal organisations (Gestapo and Vopo were criminal organisations according to the German justice) it shouldn't be called Popo, but PolPo.
And yes, that new uniform trousers give them a nice form.
I once got in "trouble" after I had written a report to the prosecutors about an incident that had happen between on of our sentries and a wannabe intruder (got a shot in the shoulder from my fellow sentry and had claimed there was no warning before) to our airbase, where I used the word Kripo for Kriminalpolizei (the detectives). Next day not I, but our Commodore! sic! got a call he should teach me to use the proper form KriPol. One of the few cases where a Corporal could laugh together with a Colonel.

Erwin

Yes, Erwin. Sweden does indeed have government-run, tax-financed education for immigrants in the Swedish language. That is because Sweden is a (morally rotten) welfare state. My wife Thi has been attending classes in Swedish almost continuously for the past four years, ever since she first came to Sweden. And it is amazing that she has learned to speak Swedish as well as she has. Thi has worked really hard. I admire her. I really do.

But Thi is from Vietnam! Which means that she is accustomed to speaking an *Asian* language (Vietnamese). And the proununciation (i.e. the "sound") of the words in the Asian languages are all *very* different from those of the Western languages of Europe. For example, the Japanese are famous for not being able to enunciate "r". Instead of saying "r", most Japanese will say "l".

Well, Thi has not been able to kick the habit of pronouncing the letters in words the "Vietnamese" way, even when she is speaking Swedish. It is so darn hard!

And I am not in a position to blame Thi. Because even though I have been living in my home country Sweden for 40 years now (I returned to Sweden after an 11-year sojourn in the USA when I was a child), I *still*, to this day, speak Swedish with such a strong American accent that most Swedes take me for being an immigrant from another country. And many Swedes succeed in guessing the "right" country - the USA. I put the word "right "in scare quotes because I am not "really" an American. I just lived in the USA for 11 years. But I was born in Sweden, to Swedish parents.

Galt54,

I have read that if a person learns one or more languages before puberty they will speak them perfectly without an accent but if the the person doesn't learn the language until after puberty they will always have an accent although with much work it can be minimized.

Well, that piece of information makes *some* sense to me, tiptopper. I must have spoken Swedish without any accent up until the age of five, when my family moved to America. In America, my parents never spoke Swedish, because they wanted me and my younger sister, Sophy, to learn as much English as possible. So by the time we returned to Sweden, when I was sixteen, I had forgotten virtually all my Swedish, and I had to relearn the language. Nowadays, I speak Swedish fluently. I have been living here in Sweden, speaking Swedish every day, for fourty years now. And there is nothing wrong whatsoever with my grammar and spelling. But I speak Swedish with a *very* strong American accent. I just seem unable to get myself rid of it.

But the trouble I have with your theory is the case of my sister, Sophy. She was only one year old when we moved to America. So English was her first language. And when we moved back to Sweden she was twelve years old. So she had reached puberty when she started learning to speak Swedish for the first time. But nowadays she speaks Swedish without any accent at all. People who talk to her and do not know her background, do not suspect that she grew up in America, and that English was her first language.

By the way, while we are on the subject of my sister - I will tell you of her attitude towards my fetish. Politically, my sister is much more "liberal" than me, in the American sense of the word. In other words she is leftist in politics (I am an advocate of full, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, since I am an Objectivist). But Sophy is not at all tolerant and laidback in regard to my openness about sexual matters. I love to talk about sex and spanking. I think that it is such a fascinating subject. And I am not shy. I am not too embaressed to tell people that I am a spanko. But my sister finds the spanking fetish to be a bit disgusting. She tells me that I should hide my spanking fetish from people. She does not want me to discuss it. She urges me to keep it private. Well, I see value in "coming out". If we spankos wish to be able to pursue happiness the way that is appropriate for us, giving our "taste", we must be willing to stand for what we are, and to publicly defend our right to practice our fetish. So I refuse to follow my sister´s advice. I let people know that I am a spanko, and I discuss the subject with anyone who is willing to listen.

Erwin - yes, someone posted on Flickr two pictures of a German policewoman from the rear (she had long black hair and didn't look very Germanic so maybe she was ethnic Turkish) and she had one of the nicest arses I've ever seen, beautifully presented in the rather soldierlike trousers. But ours have tight uniform trousers too and some have been complaining in one breath that the trousers make their bottoms look huge and that they "don't do anything for our figures"! How illogical can you get?

On immigrants speaking English, a friend settled in Finland and married to a Finn told me that when they were courting and he was visiting his mother-in-law to be, a lady of the old school, he happened to have seen his beloved's younger daughter in town earlier, so he happily announced, with just a slight mistake of one letter in Finnish, "Hello! I screwed your daughter in the town today!" Conversely, many Finns pronounce the English words "important" as "impotent" and "soup" as "soap" - but I can quite see why.

What do accents matter?
A small country like the UK has many regional accents, some vey strong.
Even in Yorkshire there are pronounced differences between different areas.
Birmingham and the Black Country are very different despite being geographically adjacent.
The important thing is to be understood, everything else is snobbery.
Having said that when I went to Uni nearly fifty years ago I often had to ask my Geordie friend to repeat himself.
My father died with his Yorkshire accent despite having last lived there at the outbreak of WW2!
In the West Country each county has distinctly different accents.
It is fascinating how relatively tiny distances eg fifty miles gave rise to such differing accents, which still differ today over a century after travel became commonplace.

Jimi

On my very first date with Thi, on May 7th, 2009 (yes, the date is etched in my mind, since I really love Thi) Thi told me that she was going to church the next Sunday (the 7th of May, 2009 was a Thursday, I remember that as well). She said, this is the Swedish - "Jag ska gaa i kyrkan paa soendag." "Kyrkan" is the Swedish word for "the church". But Thi´s pronunciation was so atrocious that I thought she said "kyckling" (because Thi pronounces "r" as "l"). So I asked her - "What? You are going to eat chicken on Sunday?" I didn´t understand why it was so important for Thi to tell me that she was going to eat chicken on Sunday, because that was such a trivial piece of information. But after a long discussion, I finally understood that Thi was trying to tell me that she was going to visit a church the next Sunday!

"Kulturkrock" is a concept we have in the Swedish language - "a conflict of cultures" (or in this case, languages).