[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by HarryT

That's OK - I did it for you . Fortunately it was only a 40 minute flight, because her English wasn't great, and my Italian is limited to be able to ask for a cup of coffee, which doesn't get you terribly far in a discussion of Jane Austen . I sometimes fall back to asking for things in Latin, which gets you a few funny looks, but works surprisingly often!

I took years of French and worked hard to have a pretty good accent in it (and was complimented on it multiple times when in Paris so it paid off), and a year of Italian at university, and later had to suddenly move to Buenos Aires alone for a little while. I had to quickly learn Spanish 'on the street' there (at least enough to get by), but people often thought my speech was the funniest thing ever, because I was a native English speaker speaking garbled Spanish (speaking to someone new, I'd usually start with a warning like, 'hola, mi gramática es terrible pero...') with Italian words thrown in whenever I knew the word in Italian but not Spanish (which was often enough, and it often worked for people to understand), and all in a semi-French accent for some reason (I wasn't really consciously aware of this, but since this was apparently the funniest part everyone there were more than willing to let me know!).

But, it worked! I got by. Now, though I've forgotten good chunks of my French, Italian and Spanish because I haven't been travelling nearly as much and haven't been keeping up my lingual studies as I might've liked, I can still halfway speak a sort of Spanglish to anyone who speaks Spanish, but now with another wrench thrown in- I speak it with a definite Argentine accent. Anyone who speaks Spanish will tell you that their accent is quite unique as I've learned since leaving Argentina, and it's apparently very hard to understand from someone who's trying one's best to communicate in Spanglish (for instance, I tend to highly emphasise certain syllables, and always say 'vos' (bos) instead of 'tu' and pronounce ll as 'zhe' -maravizhoso, amarizho- and sometimes y as sort of a quick dzhj such as in 'yo').