Dating a Foreigner

BY ONEIKA RAYMOND

One thing is certain: I like getting to know “the Other”. I like being with people different from myself, often in their interests, but particularly with regards to their culture and language. As someone who was a language major in university, currently a language teacher, an avid traveller who has lived and worked on three different continents in three distinct parts of the world, and an aspiring polyglot, this comes as no surprise. My dating history speaks to this fact; my last boyfriends have, in the overwhelming amount of cases, been foreigners who don’t speak English as their first language.

I confess that I’m drawn to people who don’t have English as their mother tongue. I am fascinated by language acquisition in general and how the puzzle pieces of grammar, pronounciation, syntax, idiom, slang, and intonation come together to construct a message, and how this message ends up conveying meaning.

They say that the best way to quickly acquire a language and its unique vocabulary is through the procurement of a significant other who speaks that language, and I can staunchly vouch for veracity of this statement. It was through “pillow talk” that I learned words in French, Spanish, and German that I would have never learned from a textbook.

I also love foreign accents in English. Call me a nerd, but as much as I don’t find Antonio Banderas attractive, I am ready to melt at his feet when he speaks in heavily accented English.

I often love the mistakes that non-native English speaking people make- it just makes them so lovable and endearing! Liebling totally falls into this category. While his English is fairly solid and he speaks with great fluency, it is his accent and grammar mistakes that identify him as ESL (English as a second language). He is sensitive about his English and really wants to improve but I think his accent makes him unique and is so darn cute. The fact that he is a native German speaker has also been a great help since I started taking German. Who better to practice what I’ve learned in class than with Liebling?

Dating a foreigner can also come with its drawbacks, particularly when he or she does NOT speak English. When I lived in Mexico, I started seeing a Uruguayan guy (let’s call him Alejandro). Now, the Uruguayan variety of Spanish is VERY heavily accented and has a number of pronounciation differences to Mexican Spanish (most notably the “ll”- pronounced as a “y” sound in Mexico and a “sh” in Uruguay). Sorry to say that I regretfully understood very little of what my dear Alejandro had to say. It was frustrating trying to communicate with him knowing that I couldn’t just fall back on English. But I will say that I learned a fair amount of Spanish with him and that, at least if I couldn’t understand what he was saying, he was very nice to look at…

Anybody have any experiences with dating a foreigner, particularly someone who does not speak your native language?

SHARING IS CARING

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