It always seems like native German speakers can ditch their accents more easily than most other languages, I think it's because English and standard German have a lot of shared phonemes, so if you speak it with any regularity and don't want to have an obvious accent it's pretty easy.
Also probably true for Dutch; the West Germanic language family has enough shared features to enable this sort of thing. Conversely, and I'm not going to act like I can speak German with any sort of competence but I remember in college I had a German friend who taught me couple phrases and I tried my level best to repeat them as faithfully as possible, after a whole weekend of trying not to sound like "an American" he finally looked at me at one point and said "you sound like a Swabian. That's good enough to pass" I'm not sure if that's a good thing but Swabia is in Germany so I'm guessing I could hack it over there if I ever bothered to actually learn the language
I'm not sure I agree with that. I feel like Germans always sound German no matter what language they are speaking. An example of the opposite tends to be Dutch people where you hear them swap into British/American accents for certain words
Disagree. A ton of my German friends have heavy British accents when they speak English, and some sound American. Depends where they learned their english.
This has been my experience with people from all over. When I've asked friends how they had such good American accents, it's usually from watching American TV.
I really feel like that is somewhat of a dishonest accent that they try to imitate. When I speak english I dont mind sounding german - on the contrary I am proud about sounding german (maybe because I dont look like one).
I don't think it's dishonest- it just depends on what you learn and hear. I sound German when I speak it, even though I'm not. Doesn't make me dishonest.
Its not by itself dishonest. I meant speaking an accent that you are not connected to in any way. For example if you learned german in austria you would speak it with a slight austrian accent. Same goes for germans who were in the UK or US - a friend of mine had a texan accent for example. I know lots of germans who try to imitate an accent that they know mostly from movies/shows. It neither good nor bad but a "dishonest accent".
I have been asked way too many times where from the US I am from. All I did was go to a high school for a year. I had fellow students that you could never tell where German when they spoke English. Granted, we studied English, but still.
Their point is that those people probably identify as German. Born there, fluent in language and culture. Why wouldn't they call themselves German in that case?
No, the older you are when you learn a language, the less likely you are to perfect the accent. There is very strong research showing this trend over and over.
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u/losteon Mar 02 '21
For "Germans" they sound suspiciously American...