Oh my God, the accent!

Good evening readers. Your jellyfish has been following the current this week and finds herself in Lumberjackland for a few days (I'm going to watch him play hockey tonight! He is terrified, evidemment, even though he got a taste a few months ago for the type of hockey I'm used to seeing in my little alpine hometown, which I don't believe is very impressive for a Canadian!)

Not a good excuse for a blogging silence, especially with all the new experiences last week had to offer. But one post at a time, so let me give you a glimpse of my Wednesday night and my first encounter with the ``change your accent'' attitude.

I have traveled a fair bit and it's my pride to have friends from all over the place but never before had I been in one room with such a wild mix of nationalities. My ``standard speech class,'' a polite name for the ``reduce your accent and blend in, you foreigner'' class, was like the United Nations. From Mongolia to Italy to Brazil to Russia, here we all were. A dozen eager adults who, for a variety of reasons, were willing to shell out a few hundred bucks and spend two hours a week forcing unnatural sounds out of their Colombian and French and Italian jaws.

And what was the main reason for that? Well ladies and gentlemen, that's where I felt moved. For a majority of attendees, the main motivation for this class was...simply to be understood by Americans!
Quite logical, you may say.
Except that all these people had a respectable level of English and that they were all perfectly understandable to my ears.
So in the end, for at least half of my classmates, this is what it comes down to: an extra effort so that their American interlocutor won't put an early end to a potentially fruitful dialogue by exclaiming ``What's that?!'' (one of my top three most hated phrases in English.)
I found it admirable.

Beyond that, the cases varied: if one was tired of not being called back after auditions, most of the group didn't have the ambition to act for a living but simply felt it would help them in their daily life. I begged to differ (after all, a French accent has never hurt any woman trying to make contacts in Washington, so why would I want to drop it?) and commented that the speech class had been presented to me as the key to an acting class, which I was longing to take.
But I tried to convey that with humour. I don't think adding to the sulking/blase French stereotype would have been a good idea.

That said, in some ways, cliches caught up with us in that empty classroom. My Brazilian colleague was attractive and tanned; the Chinese student wanted to reach ``excellency;'' and the Slavic late comer -- I think Russian, but I need to check -- confirmed the bluntness we sometimes associate with that part of the world.

My Slavic classmate entered just as my Indian colleague was standing, explaining her decision to attend. A long and lively speech, full of anecdotes and smiles. Sergei, when his turn came, fired right away. ``I came in, I thought she was the teacher,'' he said. ``I thought `Oh my God, the accent!'''

All that said without a smile, of course.

I think even though I'm note taking an acting class this semester, I may still be in for standup comedy every week.

The teacher is friendly and is trying to learn French (which gives her an automatic good ranking on my likeable scale) and she trained journalists seeking to lose their regional accent for years before focusing now on little creatures like us.

The one thing I came away with during that first session is simple but huge! While we were repeating weird phrases like ``what a to do to die today, at a minute or two, to two, a thing distinctly hard to say, but harder still to do,'' she ordered us to say them with a smile.
That's because Americans speak with a smile, she said, which helps explain the way they pronounce their vowels in an horizontal way, as opposed to a vertical one (like the Brits who wouldn't be caught dead smiling.). So try the ``what a to do..'' with a smile. Isn't it amazing?

I should be careful though. I have been told in the U.S. that I don't smile enough. A little more work on my zygomatic muscle and my core Frenchness may be endangered.