Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

so to speak
. 
7. GETTING COMFORTABLE
WOMAN:
Um, well, I think that, um, one of the hardest 
things, um, for learning any foreign language is, uh, just 
becoming comfortable with yourself in that language. 
Um, and, uh, so, for example, pronunciation for me, uh, 
one of the, I think I’ll always have an ac—, a foreign accent 
in English, no matter how many years I live here, and you 

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have to feel comfortable with that, OK? I have a foreign 
accent and that’s just me, that’s just part of me, part of 
who I am, and you have to reach a point at which you 
feel comfortable, comfortable with that and not, uh, self-
conscious about it. So that’s one of the hardest things.
Now, if we go to the specifi cs, uh, I think that one of 
the things that everybody complains about when they’re 
learning English is all these preposition—I think they 
call them particle verbs—these prepositional verbs like, 
uh, 
turn up
, 
turn out
, 
turn in
. Everybody gets confused 
about those, uh, and if you get the wrong preposition, of 
course, you’re saying the wrong thing. So I think that’s a 
hard thing because it’s very idiomatic, and, of course, the 
most idiomatic aspects of the language are the ones that 
are harder to learn. You just have to get immersed in the 
culture and just pick them up.
I have trouble with, uh, the accents-accents from, uh, 
the South of the United States, uh, ’cause, I mean, if, I 
think I can travel anywhere in the Northeast and even 
though there are diff erent accents, I don’t think I have 
problems understanding people in general. Um, I’ve lived 
in the Northwest and in the Southwest, and I never had 
any trouble, but when I lived in North Carolina, when I 
fi rst moved to North Carolina, I could not understand 
my own students. I mean, I had trouble with the south-
ern accent and then, of course, I got used to it. But, uh, 
yeah, in terms of geographical accents, I would say the 
southern accent.