>> It would be interesting to hear views of others. Almost universally,
those acquaintances I have, professional or
>> otherwise, who speak faultless - really faultless - English (e.g. not
using progressive tenses unnecessarily,
>> incorrect use of the perfect) are those who studied Anglistik and
spent years reading Dickens and Amis (that's
>> Martin).
Interesting. I suppose it depends on what you mean by "faultless". If it
means being able to pass as a native-speaker of English (which it
probably doesn't), it tends in my experience to be mostly those German
speakers who didn't learn the language at school and have subsequently
adopted an authentic regional variant.
Incidentally, I don't suppose I am alone in this, but virtually my first
experience on arriving in a German-speaking country at the age of 15 was
having my English pronunciation corrected. Over the years I have become
more an more irritable about this, particularly the assumption that I
can't even pronounce my own name properly.
Howard Gaskill
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