@Sama

I think that's correct. I find that some students will let this inhibit their ambition to practice speaking. I imagine it's even harder as you get older because adults are more self-aware/self conscientious.

@DavidK

Yes, I agree. There is a lot of emphasis on correctness and not necessarily on communication. I feel like pronunciation standards for non-native speakers are often higher than the standards for native speakers. For example, with formal tests like TEFL, some of the requirements most native speakers wouldn't even pass.

@Nikita

Thanks again for your contributions to this discussion.

@Kenji Murozaki

Thanks for your comments. Your English is great! I have heard this a lot about different accents in Brazil. I was watching one video of an American who learned Brazilian Portuguese and said that sometimes native speakers think he is just from another region of Brazil with a different accent because the accents are so different between states in Brazil.

I agree with what you say about making mistakes. I think that it's easy to get frustrated as a student of a foreign language about not speaking correctly, but I know that in English, we are so used to accents from all over the world that we have become quite used to the different pronunciations of English from non-native speakers.

Is it like that in Brazil? Are people becoming pretty used to foreigners speaking Portuguese?

@Pam

I notice this a lot with Spanish. It adds to the difficulty of learning the language because there are so many dialects and accents. Of course in the United States, we tend to learn the Mexican accent for Spanish. Then when we watch movies from Spain, it's like another language. What do Spanish speakers think about people who speak Spanish as a second language with accents from countries other than Spain? Does it make it even more difficult to understand them? Is it better to try and switch your accent based on the country where the person is from that you are speaking to? Or is it better to just stick with one accent and become proficient in that one?

@🥀ᑎᗩDᗩ 🥀

I agree. I have read about non-native English speaking actors who pay crazy amounts of money to get coaching on speaking English without an accent. Then when I see them in movies, I think they speak perfect English, but later will watch them in an unscripted interview and see that they only achieved that perfection for the movie. I think that the most natural sounding multilingual speakers are people who grew up with parents who speak different languages or grew up in a country where the national language is different than the language that is spoken at home. Do you agree?

@Tim

Thanks for your thoughts on this topic and for clarifying what I mean by people sounding too mechanical. Of course I am not criticizing anyone for how they speak the language, it's just something that I have observed with people who have learned English technical jobs for example.

Thanks again for your comments.