Foreign Accent

There were many International students at the university I studied in mid-west U.S.A.- students from Europe, the Middle East. Africa, Korea and Japan. They all speak English with different accents. I find French accent cute especially when spoken by women. African accent is difficult to understand

I didn't know that people could be interested in the Malaysian accent I speak. Its not really Malaysian though. It has been seasoned by years of living abroad. I was doing a presentation in class one day and I started noticing the audience were unusually attentive. May be the presentation was good because I had put in a lot of effort in its preparation. I started to congratulate myself. However, at the end of the presentation the class was strangely quite. That was strange. Americans were a boisterous lot. The professor called out for comments. None came. Then somebody from the back said "We were paying attention to his accent - not so much to the contents"

My accent got me into another uncomfortable situation. In another presentation I was talking about medieval plays where actors who played Adam and Eve put on tight fitting body stockings to simulate nakedness. There was a suppressed laughter. Later I found out because of my accent, the audience heard me saying "stimulate" instead of "simulate"

Let the accents prevail