Stereotypes About Native English Speakers

[lingvo]

English speaking natives are as much as heterogeneous as Spanish natives. Take a look at different stereotypes for people from different regions. Say, texans, the common stereotype is that they are fond of guns and have a rash accent. Canadians are quite polite, loves hockey and tend to say sorry often. British people like tea, their food is perceived as terrible and are quite pompous.

[Beautyfulbree]

There are always exceptions to every stereotype. I myself fall in with those who don't fluently speak more than one language. I do however aspire to learn. I think English is such a well known language that we expect others to be able to communicate with us. Unfortunately, this is unfair for those with alternative tongues. 

[sidney]

I think that one of the stereotypes among native English speakers is that they speak grammatically correct sentences. This is actually not the truth, because my teacher did say that native English speakers are the ones most prone to speak erroneous English sentences, and that's actually quite true. I did notice some native English speakers speak incorrect English.

[CosmicSeven]

Yeah, I definitely don't speak with any grammar in mind. Most people I know just speak strictly flow-of-consciousness, ebbing away from sentences and splicing them all the time. It's all very natural. 

[blotteracids]

Oh my god you mentioned you think Americans can only speak english, and I'd never realized I always assume that too, but mostly because we always think Americans are too superficial or prejudicing to learn about any other culture... Even the Americans who speak Spanish seem to not really care that much for the language and either 1. only learn because it's mandatory or 2. so they can use it for jobs. I guess it is really just a stereotype, because obviously there are many types of people in the US.

[essennella]

There is definitely a lot more motivation to learn a foreign language here in the US than before. A lot of high schools use the Advanced Placement program, otherwise known as AP, where students can take tests on specific subjects to try and earn college credit for them. AP exams are extremely hard and require specific courses with the title AP just to learn the content. You can take an AP exam without taking the course (I did), but it's difficult learning on your own. These tests are administered all over the country.

AP exams have tests for language classes too: English, Spanish, French, German, Latin, Japanese, and Chinese, I believe are the languages. In the Spanish test, you had to answer questions about reading passages, answer questions about an audio source that they played, answer questions about both a reading passage and audio source at the same time, write a formal essay, respond informally to an email, take part in a simulated conversation, and make a comparison between the culture of the United States vs that of a Spanish-speaking country, ALL parts, including the speaking, reading, and writing, being in Spanish, of course.  A lot of students who take the tests usually end up studying the language past high school. My high school even took some students from the Spanish classes to Spain. My high school offers 6 languages: English, Spanish, French, Latin, German and American Sign Language (ASL).

So while most Americans cannot speak more than one language, as the years go by, it's becoming more and more mandatory to learn foreign languages with there being better incentives to do so. It's especially important because Spanish speakers are coming close to outnumbering English speakers.

[Maryam_Yasmeen]

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[CalvinGordon]

On what characteristics or what should the accent sound like.