The phonetic similarity between Russian and Spanish is a huge relief. As a Russian speaker, pronouncing English has always felt like a workout for my mouth; the sounds are completely alien. Spanish, on the other hand, is effortless. It just flows, since I'm using the same phonetic toolkit I grew up with.
Yeah, I have the opposite problem, being a native English speaker living in Portugal - to my ear, I’ll say something perfectly coherent and pronounced exactly as the locals do - and they won’t understand a bloody word. It isn’t just the phonemes, it’s the cadence - syllabic vs rhythmic stress. I’ll be like “um galão” and they’ll be like “galão?”, “sim, um galão”, “um… que? Galão?”, “sim,
galão”, “ahhh, um galão!” and I just can’t seem to be understood.
My wife is a native Russian speaker, and despite making numerous grammatical errors is far better understood than I am.
German, I have no such problem despite being far weaker at the language imo.
> to my ear, I’ll say something perfectly coherent and pronounced exactly as the locals do
I noticed a similar thing listening to many English people trying to speak Spanish. I could hear that the native English speaker pronounced the vowel sounds of a Spanish word incorrectly - but that the English speaker could not tell. Very common if Spanish word learnt from reading and trying to pronounce it as English might. I also hear a similar reading mistake from other countries trying to speak English.
English can have extreme vowel variation - e.g. jokes based on bending vowel sounds to change word meaning. Spanish has a few vowel sounds and they seem very similar in different countries. English accents often change vowel sounds dramatically - so English speakers are not as aware of the importance of speaking vowels correctly. As a New Zealander, our vowel sounds trip up other English speakers.
I'm not sure how we learn to fix it when our hearing or sound formation is incorrect. Someone to incessantly correct one's mistakes does help but that level of patience is hard to find.
I know that I still can't hear or say nasal sounds correctly in other languages.
I think the issue here is that it's hard work for a native English speaker to keep track of the correctness of every single vowel sound because in English so many are elided or become "uh".
Listen carefully to different English accents, or even better try and mimic them.
There's a massive variety of vowel sounds in English: Sydney, Irish, Boston, Indian, etcetera.
English speakers can often hear the differences, and many people can produce the different vowels when mimicking the accents (country, city, person, foreigner).
I did not deny the fact that there is a greater variety of vowel sounds available in English. I merely doubt its explanatory power for the phenomenon you describe. But perhaps I am confused about exactly what that phenomenon is.
Actors and singers do it by hiring a voice coach - someone who doesn't just know the sounds, but can explain how to adjust your mouth muscles to make them correctly.
Most classes and individual teachers won't do that. They'll either think "Eh, good enough for a foreigner" and shrug, or they'll say "That's wrong" and repeat the correct sound at you, which won't fix the problem.
Sometimes changes happen in one language. There is a huge difference between the Received Pronunciation (RP) version of British English that was the standard up to around the early 90s, and the Estuary English that became mainstream after that.
European Portuguese sounds very Slavic; I'm sure Russians have a blast with it. English is a phonetically isolated language, largely due to the Great Vowel Shift. Unlike English, most languages have a closer linguistic relative. This makes English challenging for most people to learn, and it also makes it difficult for native English speakers to learn a foreign language without a heavy accent.
I've always been curious about how the non-English world feels about hearing their language spoken with a strong "English" accent. Dont they just get on with it? As a native English speaker I'm totally unfazed by strongly accented English: Indian accents, Chinese accents, Italian etc. For example Italians rarely pronounce the H in house (presumably because H is silent in Italian). Even twists like unusual word stress patterns or prnounciations are easily figured out on the fly.
I know that Parisians are supposed to be one exception: infamously snooty about visitors speaking French absolutely perfectly. But fpr everyone else, it's 2025 and we live in a world of mass tourism and mass migration. Are the non-English still fazed by English accents and insistent on audible correctness?
Growing up in the US I was similarly comfortable with accents. Having lived ~10 years in China/Taiwan I struggle now. For instance I often can't understand Australians at all. It's completely incomprehensible. British English is a bit of a strain sometimes
Similarly Chinese in China have little exposure to non-native speakers so I often find people can't understand me. While in Taiwan you can use the wrong tones and grammar and people don't have any issues figuring it out
But for instance a lot of local people really struggle with Indian English bc it's seldom used in the media landscape, while for me it sounds natural bc a lot of my colleagues speak it
I don't know that it's necessarily about snootiness. You learn to understand thick accents through exposure, and many countries don't have such a high amount of non native speakers running around as English speaking ones do.
I have a friend who struggled to understand thick Latin American accents. I understand a lot of accents by now well enough, but I somewhat recently spoke to a Nigerian person for the first time in my life and it was a struggle.
I'm not even getting into languages that have a high degree of tonality or homophony going on. That's an entire extra layer of difficulty when your counterparty in the conversation is not fluent.
I am a German native speaker fluent in English and living in Spain for a few years with not much opportunity of learning the language.
I just finished A2 in community college. Many of my classmates were native English speakers or Russians.
Most of them are elderly and Spanish is their first foreign language.
My Spanish is not good enough yet to judge pronunciation, but my impression is, that the russian accent is much more pronounced when beginners speak German or English than in Spanish.
The older Brits and Irish that learned no other foreign language before have a very hard time even realising their English accent.
I just left London, my first time going and as a native English speaker I struggled more with understanding perfect English with a British accent than I ever do with someone who speaks perfect or imperfect English with a heavy accent where English is a second language.
And when I first started working with Indians that were still in India, I had to adjust my speech and slow down a lot because they struggled with my southern accent.
Despite having worked 10x harder at it than I did Portuguese or Spanish. When speaking those two languages, it’s close enough to a correct accent that people often will ask if my family is Latino or Portuguese once they hear that im American or hear my English. This hasn’t happened 5 times but so many, I just assume it will happen now.
However my experience has been different in French, even if it’s obvious I’ve worked very hard at French (C1 now), my French friends are not begging to speak to me in French unless they have limited English skills… just because my pronunciation/cadence/intonation isn’t quite right or even remotely ok, despite having much more immersion in French than those other two languages. French also feels like I’m singing at a concert rather that just conversing.
Just sometimes your culture/brain/ linguistic mix result in happy or unhappy accidents.
Edit I’m sure someone will bring up cultural differences but I have several multilingual friends .. they all say my Spanish is beautiful and nearly to a person criticize my French (in a helpful friendly manner), this is true if they’re Latin American or French. Just seriously it’s a thing, brains are weird.
