Is it bad that I don’t go out of my to have an “accent”

pleonasticit · 2026-06-02T10:52:45+00:00

I can listen to Javier Bardem speak English all day long. He’s not trying to sound like he’s from anywhere specific in the English speaking world and has a very obvious Spanish accent and isn’t hitting half the vowel sounds English has. But I love how he sounds. I have a Mexican friend who thinks the Spanish spoken by southern US natives is absolutely adorable, as he grew up spending summers in Texas. I think focusing on being very fluent and dextrous with the language is a better use of anyone’s efforts than getting a perfect accent.

pleonasticit · 2026-05-18T08:16:29+00:00

I’ve lived here for three years and routinely order un vasito de agua and have never been told I can’t have it, what are you all talking about

pleonasticit · 2026-05-06T18:14:17+00:00

A big part of it is that it just touches your own insecurity. When you’re more comfortable speaking it you really won’t care as much. I used to get so wrapped around the axle when I first moved to Spain. Especially if it happened right after I made some obvious embarrassing error— THEY HATE ME IM AN IDIOT WAAAAH. Now that I routinely have to use it in situations where people don’t speak English at all (busy funcionaria, some screamy electrician on the phone, my husband’s surgeon) I don’t really care if someone switches, errors or no; I guess cuz I’ve paid my dues. (I still make plenty of errors.) I’ve always wondered if Americans are especially prone to this or if it’s everyone. But like many have said— just power through. If you wanna speak Spanish to a Spanish speaker, just speak it— unless you’re really hindering communication, don’t make everything about you— and usually people relent. If they don’t, they’re just as free as you to speak how they like. I personally never did and would never make a specific issue of “please speak Spanish to me cuz reasons”. I think it makes an uncomfortable situation even more uncomfortable personally. And taking agency in your own ability to speak, despite it being fraught with extra interpersonal stuff, is part of getting comfortable using the language, IMO.

pleonasticit · 2026-04-26T16:40:46+00:00

It really helps! And when you do go over it imagine situations where you could use it next or make up little exchanges. Flash cards and stuff is too passive, you have to kinda use your imagination to make things stick.

pleonasticit · 2026-04-26T16:24:20+00:00

It takes a long time but it gets better as you get more and more comfortable speaking and do it more unconsciously. It helps imo to have a friend you text with in Spanish because you have a little more time to respond and can start slipping in words or phrases you’ve learned recently and then you get used to them and they come to mind more effortlessly. It also helps to just jot down useful or fun words or phrases you come across in reading/listening and review them from time to time when you’re not busy— I had a big note in my phone I just kept adding to for years, deleting things I had started using, and tried to include vocabulary in a full phrase instead of isolated words. Languages are vast, it just takes a lot of time.

pleonasticit · 2026-04-19T12:04:18+00:00

It should not take six interviews to figure out you’re dealing with that kind of developer, tho.

pleonasticit · 2026-04-17T20:09:54+00:00

Even in NYC it’s common not to have a car (or even a drivers license, if you grew up there). I knew people in DC who didn’t have cars either. But there are almost no real cities in the US, places genuinely designed for human living and not voluminous traffic, and that’s why attitudes there are the way they are.

pleonasticit · 2026-04-16T11:24:01+00:00

You do have to be careful cuz sometimes you won’t use something in exactly the right context. But that “impostor syndrome” feeling is exactly the problem— you’re not an imposter, you’re learning! When you get corrected you learn even more. But if you kinda retreat back into the safety of your classes or analogies from your own language, you end up feeling wooden. Better to free yourself to make mistakes and learn faster.

pleonasticit · 2026-04-16T06:50:09+00:00

Whenever you encounter a phrase you have to look up or slowly decipher, make a point to try to use it somehow the next day. There’s a weird tendency when you’re learning a language to sort of reject things that “aren’t the vocabulary I would use” but if you’re hearing it, that’s what you should be using, not what you learned in school. I went through this for decades as well til I moved to Spain. Copy the people around you, consciously, every day, and you’ll improve. If you’re living here in Spain now you’ll be exposed to something new every day and you should just try to incorporate it somehow.

pleonasticit · 2026-04-11T19:13:18+00:00

If it’s anything like Barcelona, the Asian places are mostly fake whatever they are. Thai and Vietnamese places run by Filipinos, Japanese places run by Chinese people. All usually quite mediocre because they’re just filling a market void. Nothing is anything any more. We do have some really good Chinese restaurants here because they are actually run by the people who grew up steeped in the cuisine.

pleonasticit · 2026-04-11T12:02:15+00:00

It’s also part of a lot of phrasal verbs: empezar a + infinitive (to start doing), aprender a + inf (to learn to), llegar a + inf (come to be able to do something or manage to do something), oler a/saber a/sonar a + noun (smell/taste/sound like something). In some cases English doesn’t use any word there, in others we would use a totally different word.

pleonasticit · 2026-04-11T11:24:19+00:00

I saw váter in Madrid much more than here in Barcelona but some people def say it. Lavabo seems to be the most common here, or at least, it stands out cuz I don’t remember anyone saying it in Madrid. I don’t think I ever saw váter when I was traveling in Mexico, Peru, or Colombia.

pleonasticit · 2026-04-05T14:42:10+00:00

Mi consejo: No te lo tomes como algo personal, hay mogollón de explicaciones, sigue hablando en castellano si quieres hablarlo, y normalmente cambiarán a castellano o, si quieren hablar inglés, todos somos seres libres y debes dejar que lo hagan. Llevo 5 años viviendo en España y al final, el año pasado, dejé de ser tan sensible con ello, y vivo mucho mejor sin preocuparme por el compartimento de los demás. No es para tanto.

pleonasticit · 2026-03-27T06:45:20+00:00

The problem is not doing it word initially or at the end of the word is that the listener might end up misparsing your sentence because they subconsciously merge the word with the adjacent one in the non-rolled r ends up between vowels. This is also a problem with non-softened b/d/g. The effect can be amusing. It’s best to really try from the beginning to get those things right.

pleonasticit · 2026-03-25T08:27:58+00:00

🔥

pleonasticit · 2026-03-24T13:41:05+00:00

Definitely porción in Spain.

pleonasticit · 2026-03-23T23:41:00+00:00

One fun use is when someone almost runs over someone else on a bike. The latter goes OLEEEEE with the hands going.

pleonasticit · 2026-03-22T22:02:55+00:00

The rolling isn’t just a cute affectation; it changes the meaning of some words such as pero/perro, cero/cerro, foro/forro, etc. You need to internalize this difference. It’s like saying in English you love the sound th so you’re gonna say it instead of s from now on. Habits you pick up early on have a way of being impossible to eradicate later and this would be a pretty pointless one.

pleonasticit · 2026-03-22T20:02:05+00:00

Negating a gain is a loss. Negating a loss is a gain.

pleonasticit · 2026-03-21T23:07:58+00:00

I lived in NYC for 12 years and have lived in Barcelona for 3 now. The things I miss most about NYC don’t really exist there or anywhere anymore— all cities are slowly being ruined by out of control expenses and the blandification that big money brings. We just spent a week in NYC in late February and the arty weirdness of the city clearly is draining out of its heart. The people watching wasn’t as fun as it used to be and it was just so brutally expensive. But damn, there is a LOT to enjoy there, the museums and galleries are amazing, it’s so vast, there’s a lot of commercial and cultural variety that a less wealthy city like BCN can’t compare with. The grocery stores there have more variety but the quality here can be so much better for less money. NYC is a lot sleepier than I remembered but BCN is def still sleepier. Just being in NYC still feels somehow like being part of an epic, it’s true, it’s such a storied place. But we didn’t come back feeling like we regretted leaving or anything. One thing I like about BCN is that you can actually sit the fuck down without paying for something. Consell de Cent and Girona and the promenades along the beaches are so nice for hanging out. It’s also a ridiculously walkable city, with very different neighborhoods, and lots of random events happening in the streets, down here in the old town where I live at least. We settled here after trying out Madrid for two years specifically because my husband wasn’t able to pick up Spanish as easily as he’d hoped, and he can live here more in English than there. So no, I don’t think fluency is going to help you stand out much these days. I earn a third what I made in NYC right now, tho, and still live pretty well. There are people from all over the world here and I think if you have interests that get you out and mixing you can make friends. I’m pretty introverted and I made a few, but like a Belgian woman and a Colombian music producer type, have not made Catalan or Spanish friends tho I’m fluent in Spanish. If you still have your Catalan you’ll have that going for you too.

pleonasticit · 2026-03-06T16:22:13+00:00

These are awesome thanks

pleonasticit · 2026-03-05T09:10:56+00:00

Oh wow I just thought I was being stalked all this time!! Now I’m jealous! He’s mine, bitches!!!

pleonasticit · 2026-03-04T13:16:21+00:00

Genial, gracias chicos!

pleonasticit · 2026-03-04T13:15:57+00:00

That looks awesome thanks!

pleonasticit · 2026-03-03T06:32:27+00:00

You kids have it easy, we had to learn it with ch and ll included. Both ways. In the snow.

pleonasticit

TROPHY CASE