Quote:
Originally Posted by underscore
Growing up I had a bunch of friends that were in French immersion, their English speech was fine but for a lot of them their writing/typing was terrible, IM'ing or texting them was like reading stuff from a very fresh ESL student. A couple years after grad one of them went to France and tried to use the French he spent 12+ years becoming fluent in to order at a cafe and they refused to serve him because his French apparently wasn't bang on.
My point being whatever languages they're learning, one of them should be a primary focus over the others. Obviously being multilingual is an asset but if you can't form a coherent email in any of them I'd think that's a bit of a hindrance to your professional life later on.
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Most of the French immersion teachers are from Canadian regions where French is major language. However, it's still way off than comparing to French French. There's no right or wrong. It's just the accent a region develops.
It's only a subtle difference from outsiders, but very clear for natives.
Heck, growing up in South America, I can tell within 3 words where a person comes from. They are all Spanish, but each area (not even country... as you can have different accents in different region in the same country)
As for English accent, I agree that it has something to do with the people one grows up speaking with.
I have a relatively strong accent ("Latino" by many of my native CDN friends
) but I speak a mix of Mandarin/English with my kids as an attempt to teach them Mandarin. Their first real encounter with English were both with born&bred caucasian Canadians and they have the EXACT accent from what I can tell. Even my son's classmate's mom thinks they sound perhaps too "white" (she's a 3rd gen CDN from India) to have a Chinese face. But that's at a cost that their Mandarin also sound white.
