My ACCENT??

Last night I went to dinner at my friend's house. I met this particular friend (his name is Samuel) at the post office in Angers a couple months ago. What was weird about this dinner is that Samuel left for Scotland about a month and a half ago. Ergo, I went to dinner at Samuel's house...to eat with his family, who I didn't know at all. But they have a couple daughters who are learning English, and decided to profit from Samuel's anglophone friends (my roommate went too). We, of course, decided to profit from the offer of free food.

The family ended up being super nice; we sat around and ate for a good two hours or so. Meanwhile, Alex and I spoke English to Camille, Samuel's sister. She understood well enough (her friend had no idea what was going on), but seemed to have an easier time understanding Alex. I wondered about that, and tried to slow down my speech. Not much luck. Camille's mom explained to me later: "I think Camille and Marie (the friend) have trouble understanding you because of your accent." and I thought to myself "Oh, okay---wait, what? I have an accent?!" Apparently people from the Ohio/Pennsylvania region have some sort of accent that's hard for non-native English speakers to understand...and the more I think about it, the more I can kind of hear it, at least compared to Alex. It must be the muted 't' sound (like, when I make that sound, it's not as pronounced as someone learning English would need it to be).

On the one hand, I'm sad that I'm currently of less use to these girls than Alex is; I tried to enunciate my syllables, but my Ohioan twang must be too strong because they still had to work to comprehend. On the other hand, maybe it's good for me there with my "accent." It's not very strong, and it's probably good for these girls to get used to different accents in English, since there are so many. Anyway, they invited us back at least two more times, which is very cool.

Speaking of Samuel, Alex and I are going to visit him in Scotland in about two weeks...I'm pretty excited. We're most likely going to visit Loch Ness, and if that's the case, Samuel and I have dared each other to jump in for a quick swim...it's going to be sooooo cold, but so fun. I can't wait.


Here's an unfortunately aimed picture of Matt, boy Alex, me, Katy and girl Alex!