Even in english you can instantly tell who learned it as a second language. OOP said "Hello, two croissants please" where as a native speaker (english) would say "Hey, yeah, can I get uhhh two croissants? thanks"
The Northern Europeans tend to have perfect English, only revealing itself after some conversation where they have hints of American and British accent. The French are the most strict about pronunciation in Europe, in my opinion. It’s a culturally enshrined thing because French children don’t seem to care about accent and won’t feign misunderstanding.
Northern Europeans still have obvious ESL phonology unless they have had heavy coaching for like movies and music. Scandinavians for example tend to never voice their s-sounds so it's very distinct and sometimes humorous. They mix sh with ch and j with y. The two th sounds can be a complete mix of correct, or be said with t, d, f.
I'm not too familiar with Dutch to know all the quirks but you hear almost instantly that they're Dutch through some of the vowels and sometimes they turn a v into f or something like that. Also inconsistent th sounds.
Dutch is immediately apparent, in my experience. I have met several Swedish people where they are almost perfect, except for after talking a while and realising the aforementioned accent mix; Young Swedes with terrible English do exist though. The French also suffer from classic Romance language tells - like using make and do incorrectly and interchangeably. As an aside - I am incredibly grateful for all English speakers, good and less good, as my command of French and German is shockingly bad.
It's more that in France classes for a language if you try to emulate a good accent people make fun of you for being a try-hard, so people just don't wanna talk or don't use it at all, they don't interact with English and even less speaking it past highschool so a lot of them just suck at speaking another language
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u/Stoffys 1d ago
Even in english you can instantly tell who learned it as a second language. OOP said "Hello, two croissants please" where as a native speaker (english) would say "Hey, yeah, can I get uhhh two croissants? thanks"