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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156 Comments

  • Well I married a foreigner who's 5th language is English. His accent is really adorable especially when it comes to saying things that begin with double constants, "string" becomes "estring" and he can't hear the difference. With the Iranian accent it sounds like they are singing English to you. Especially when I speak to his parents. He's also very sensitive about his English skills and will make me repeat words over and over until he gets them. He also expects me to pick up Farsi as fast as he learned English (in one year)

    I've had major crushes on a few foreign guys I've meet. They were from Croatia, Sweden,Italy, Columbia and Germany. A German accent when speaking English is the best. I also like the Colombian accent…or any South American accent.

  • My bf is a native English speaker, but he loves to talk "Nascar".

    Hm… Does that make him "foreign"? 😉

    But in all seriousness, wonder if you've ever met the European guy trying to romance you who refuses to believe that you're not a Francophone Canadian?

  • I dated a 'hongkie' lol when I lived in Hong Kong. It was great to have him to take me to local places and restaurants tourists would not be familiar with and teach me slang. But we got into more fights than if he was a native english speaker, because his understanding of english was poorer than i originally thought and he misinterpreted many things I would say negatively.

    But overall, you lots of pros – learning about another language, i.e. cantonese slang, food, culture, history

  • My bf is Mexican and I love his accent! I have an accent too, but it's very hard to identify where I come from. I think few consider American English accents sexy (maybe the Southern one?), because we are so saturated with American English.

  • @Kourt: ohmigosh, 5 languages! That's really impressive. A lot of the people I know who speak Spanish as a native language do the whole putting an "e" before words that begin with "s" (just like in your example). So the word "Spanish" would become "Espanish", etc… So adorable!

    @Viajera: LOL at Nascar! When I lived in France, French people often thought I was somewhere from Francophone Africa, but mostly from the French Caribbean- I figured it was just because Black Canadians are such a foreign concept for them…

    @Jessica: Cross-cultural misunderstandings are tough enough without a language barrier! I do have to admit that I really like the Chinese/Hong Kong accent when speaking English though…

    @Marianne: YES! I LOVED the Mexican accent in English, soooo sexy! Where are you from? I have a weird obsession with trying to pinpoint people's accents; there is one lady at work who I SWORE was from Eastern Europe but everybody told me I was crazy for thinking so (her English is perfect and she has an Anglo-Saxon last name but there was something about the way she paused between words and pronounced certain letters)- anyway, turns out that while she's lived in Canada for the last 45 years she was born in the Ukraine! I think you're right about American accents, too; we hear them ALL the time so they are just not as "cool" as other accents to most.

  • I'm from Romania, but my accent is very hard to identify. LOL, you're like Professor Higgins :).

  • An ex's first language was an indigenous dialect along side French. However his English was quite good. Even though I took French for 9 years or so a lot was still lost in translation 🙁 French is sexy though 🙂

  • Yes, yes, yes! I am also really into getting to know The Other and in fact have been branded by friends as a Europhile, although I have a healthy fascination with Taiwanese and Japanese boys as well. 😛

    I'm absolutely charmed by accented and less-than-perfect English, even though people seem to be really sensitive about their proficiency, but I like to think that my obviously delighted smile takes the sting out of my noting their mistakes. 🙂

    In addition to admiring peoples' attempts at English (or even Chinese, sometimes) and having really great teachers to practise my own foreign language skills with, I really love learning about and understanding other cultures from an insider's perspective. That kind of cultural exchange has been so enriching to my life. 🙂

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