Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

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those accents, I did struggle a bit, yes. Um, Quebec has 
diff erent accents, even just in the French that is being 
spoken up there, and that-that’s very interesting ’cause I 
have met lots of people down here that come from Que-
bec, and we can tell which area we’re from just from the 
way we speak our French and I-I had learned English in 
school in Montreal, but I could barely speak a full sen-
tence when I got here in Baltimore for school, so basi-
cally I learned to speak English here, and I can recognize 
all the diff erent accents—English accents that are like 
being, you know, that I hear around me—but I guess my 
ears are better than, you know, my mouth, like, me, as far 
as like perfecting the way I speak English is a lot harder 
than me, like, recognizing all the other accents going on 
around me.
What was the hardest for me was to be in a very big 
group of people speaking very fast. Um, the hardest thing 
. . . I guess, I-I don’t know . . . the hardest thing. I guess 
it would be to just get used to the vocabulary, because 
the verbs in English, you know, no matter how they are 
used, whether it’s, like, future, past, or present tense, they 
always look or sound about the same. But the vocabulary 
is just so vast and luckily, going from French to English, 
lots of the words are similar, just pronounce them diff er-
ently, but I guess personally, I had, my-my biggest strug-
gle was the spoken part. I could read fi ne, I could write 
paper—it would take me a long time, but I could write 
my papers—but the dialogue part . . .
MAN:
I don’t doubt that part of that was complicated by 
the fact that nobody in America actually speaks proper 
English.

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