Melania's accent

OP why on earth are you watching/listening to anything it says?

She does a great series of videos on the myriad uses of a cucumber. But her accent is so distracting!

You learn a language by listening, and nobody ever talked to her, they just gestured what they wanted her to do.

I've only heard her voice once. I think it was her speech during the 2016 campaign.

Why hasn’t she been deported? That fraudulent Einstein visa should have expired decades ago.

But have you heard her do "The Vagina Monologues"? That's the most eloquent part of her body.

She speaks 10000 languages and has many degrees. She works on Wall Street.

Oops

Assuming this is not solely another Trump thread…

How many languages do you speak, OP?

Do you think you could sound like a native Spanish speaker like Sofia Vergara does? Or a native Slovenian speaker like Melania?

How much contact do you have with people who learned English as an adult?

r8 Give it a break. Her accent and grammar is poor for someone who has been in the US for over 20 years. Especially given the resources available to her compared to lower income immigrants.

But because of her extensive contact with thousands of English speaking Americans through her very extensive career in architecture, in which she single handedly redesigned the Manhattan skyline, you'd thjnk she'd have a better grasp of the English language, R8.

Or is Melania's career in architecture as much bullshit as your post?

Ho say kaj?

[quote]How much contact do you have with people who learned English as an adult?

How is this relevant? According to her own origin story, she started learning English during GRADE SCHOOL.

Deport this criminal alien who refuses to assimilate.

Does she speak those renowned seven languages as poorly as she speaks English I wonder? I’d pay to hear her try.

She speaks Slovenian and English. Despite the outlandish claims, no one had witnessed her speak anything else

I’m no apologist, but I wonder if the only people she really talks with are her family. You know Trump just talks at her, her White House press secretary probably just takes orders from him, and I’m sure the kids talk to her as little as possible. Or maybe she speaks perfectly and pretends not to speak well so she doesn’t have to interact with people.

There was an Asian guy I used to work with, very broken English, in his 60’s. Also very successful, and graduated from UC Berkeley 40 years earlier. The rumor was he spoke English just fine, he just hose not to around his non Asian coworkers.

[quote]She speaks 10000 languages

Yes, I can even say “Leave money on the dresser” in Arabic!

She must have talked with Barron every day. Or did he only speak Slovenian with her? I wonder how many friends she has / had? Who does she lunch with every day? Or shop with?

Or "Anal is extra"?

R8 here again.

I get this is another Trump thread, but I am guessing few of the posters are bilingual or have learned a language to become fluent as an adult.

Sofia Vergara and Melania Trump both have pronounced accents. However, they are both easy to understand and have a strong command of the language.

English speakers tend to be the harshest critics of people with accents because English speakers are most likely monolingual (even those who travel, as it’s relatively easy to visit most countries and in some cases even live abroad with no other language or perhaps a rudimentary understanding of one) and do not have a concept of what it’s like to learn a new language as an adult, mastering a new grammar and phonological system - with a new prosody, which I think most of you are honed in on.

A few people have a natural gift for this. Most do not, and will always have an accent no matter how much practice they put in, with some even seeing speech pathologists to work on accent minimization. Our brains shift after puberty, and the window to sound like a native speaker closes.

Member of my own family have some whoppers of an accent. I’ve heard them mocked, sometimes in their presence, and even directly questioned as to why they don’t speak English better. Always, every single time, without fail, by someone who is monolingual.

I get this thread is intended to trash Melania Trump, with all the fabrications and dubious assertions about her past, and with a Sofia Vergara analogy as illustration of how comical an accent can be.

But unless you can fluently speak Slovenian or Spanish or any other language that you’ve learned post-adolescence, you don’t have a leg to stand on in critiquing someone else’s accent.

She's still not going to fuck your skank ass for free, R8/R19, so ehy do you keep defending this unmitigated, unrepentant cunt?

She's a dirtball scumbag, just like her felonious, perverted old man.

[quote]She must have talked with Barron every day. Or did he only speak Slovenian with her?

Yes, it's widely established he mostly spoke with her, her parents, and her sister. None of it in English. Outside of his friend group, that is.

Once again, I can't explain DLers venting about her other than with misogyny. She's unelected, inconsequential to anything, and did not make Trump into what he is today. Nothing would happen to him, to his policies, or to his support among Americans if she were to divorce him tomorrow. She's an arm candy, you're wasting your time and energy even talking about her.

R20, my point, which I illustrated with an example from my own life, is that mocking and questioning someone’s accent, whoever that person may be, shows the ignorance, obliviousness, xenophobia, and extremely limited experience of the person making the comment.

But hey, I’ll hand it to you: you’ve made that point better than I could. Kinda MAGA in spirit, even.

I've said this here before, but my Brazilian ex had a heavy Brazilian Portuguese accent to her English, although she'd gone to a special school to learn English and gotten a master's degree in marketing from a California university.

I'm convinced she kept it on purpose because she thought it made her seem sexy and exotic (which she was).

I, OTOH, was constantly complimented on my (four years of high school) Spanish when I was in Panama, to the point that locals often spoke their naturally rapid Spanish to me when I could barely understand a word they said.

Finally I understood why they thought I was fluent, even though I told them constantly I only knew a few Spanish words (hyperbole, but true enough); it's just that my accent is so good that everyone could understand every single word I said, unlike most Americans, I guess. That's what they told me -- "I can understand you perfectly!" over and over. I attribute that to having learned it in my teens.

But don't bullshit me about Melania. I'm sure she learned English in her teens as well; most European kids did, and still do. But she's not young, so it's possible she learned Russian instead, like Angela Merkel.

R22, she and the sexual pervert to whom she's married are being held up to Americans as the perfect, happily married couple by MAGAts, Republicans, Evangelicals, when the reality is she's an ex hooker who has been in a strictly transactional relationship with Trump evet since het pimp first introduced tbem. Couple that with the outright lies she's told about her past experiences and CV, and you hardly have the poor, passive immigrant that you are trying to portray her as.

And let us never forget her snotty, bitchy fuck you to real Americans: I really don't care, do you?

Not since Eleanor Roosevelt have we seen such eloquence in a First Lady.

[quote]But unless you can fluently speak Slovenian or Spanish or any other language that you’ve learned post-adolescence, you don’t have a leg to stand on in critiquing someone else’s accent.

Everyone who speaks American English is qualified to critique a person's accent when that person is speaking American English to Americans who speak English. And that is true regardless of any arbitrary constraints you wish to place upon that criticism.

Nice try though, dummy.

[Quote] Once again, I can't explain DLers venting about her other than with misogyny.

I’ve detested her since she publicly proclaimed Obama wasn’t born in the US. Fuck this woman who prostotutes her pussy for a big paycheck.

I mean her “pooo-sie”

She’s also known for plagiarism

Beeee Bessss

Plus the lying about her degrees and the number of languages she speaks

Interesting how the right condemned Hillary for staying with Bill after the infidelity but pretends Trump has been monogamous and sent by God. Melania is wonderful and has no reason to leave Trump

“I like fist in my poosie”

I once catered an event hosted by Robin Leach. At one point in the evening, I wandered into a room where he was arguing on a phone. He sounded like someone from Brooklyn. Charo could speak perfect un-inflected English but chose not to, to keep her career going.

Melania is as big a fucking fraud as her husband.

Yes, she is a fraud.

[quote]She has given a number of interviews and speeches in English due to her role as an American public figure, but we've found little evidence documenting her fluency in any languages outside of English and her mother tongue, and some evidence that casts doubt on her claims to multilingualism.

[quote]For example, when the Trumps visited Pope Francis in Rome in May 2017, a news clip captured the pontiff jokingly asking the first lady (in Italian) what she feeds her husband. The first lady didn't appear to understand the substance of the question until a translator repeated it in English:

[quote]As other multi-linguists, such as AMERICAblog Editor John Aravosis, have noted, it seems curious that if she were truly distinctive among U.S. first ladies with her fluency in multiple languages, she would at least demonstrate that (even just a little bit) by briefly engaging locals in conversations in their native languages when she visited European countries with her husband, but she doesn't:

Thank You to Best Gay boy and Lady that defend honer of me, your First Melania!

The most suspect accent is from Charo who still sounds like she learned English yesterday.

R12 you're American i guess so you probably don't know this: in the Eastern block, you learned English in school like you learn Latin in the US. It was never spoken in class and there was no material like movies or similar. To try and get some would have immediately put you onto a list. I have a couple of friends who are from the former DDR and former Czechoslovakia and they all started at basically zero when the UDSSR collapsed. Prople spoke their own language, Russian, often French, but English was the enemy.

Who cares whether Charo has an accent? She is an accomplished musician, and, more importantly, not complicit in advancing fascism.

Not quite correct, R37. I grew up in former Yugoslavia just like she did (and we're of similar age.) At school, we could choose between English, German, French, or Russian as the foreign language to take. English (and, to a lesser degree, German) was the most popular language. In fact, my parents sent me to a bilingual kindergarten even before that, where we had daily, very basic, English instruction. On top of that, there were fairly inexpensive language institutes where one could prepare for standardized English-as-a-foreign-language tests and gain advanced skills. I don't know what it was like in the hardcore Eastern Block countries but, in her native country, it really wasn't that hard to become very proficient in English, if you really wanted to.

Of all the things to criticize, why pick her accent?

Most Americans don't know their one language well enough to pick a president or to not sound like "the People of WalMart." Donald Trump speaks at a fourth grade level while many elected officials speak at an eighth grade level.

Who cares about First-Ladies at all? They are a bit of window dressing at best, and, from time to time, root vegetables who can suck a cock for a visa and some material comforts for herself and her parents.

If the test is faultless English without a decided accent, look to Sweden not Slovenia. Otherwise it's down to listening, which does reflect as much on the listener as on the speaker.

[quote] If the test is faultless English without a decided accent, look to Sweden not Slovenia.

Unless you're talking to Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman or Viveca Lindfors.

I don't know about you, but three of my grandparents came from Europe.

In my job I deal with Americans who have accents all the time. Chinese, Korean, Italian, Indian, Swedish, Lithuanian, Mexican, etc.

Don't be Xenophobic.

There's a whore in the White House!

[Quote] Don't be Xenophobic.

Just Melania-phobic

What does she whisper in the ear of that hot Tiffany’s security head?

Melania was quite close to her mother before she died and father and got them imported to the US under as questionable circumstances as herself. Her closest friend is supposedly her sister, also imported to the US, if she was spending most of her time with other Slovenian speakers even if they were speaking English which they probably were not, it would still be much harder to lose the accent.

There were reports that during Trump's first term Melania was pretty much living with her parents and just showed up at the White House when needed.

r19 Stop it. Melania's english grammar is bad. Sophia Vegara's grammar in english is native level, but her accent is thick. Melania's english should be better given her time and resources she could access. And english speakers are far more forgiving for broken english since we are used to a wider variety of people knowing english a little.

Other language groups are far more picky.

OP ees not beink best!

r26 it is amazing how anti-American people think Americans aren't arbiters of American stuff.

[quote] Melania's english should be better given her time and resources she could access.

This. Any reasonable person whose spouse was head of state would try to improve her skills in the language of that state.

If you have ever learned a second or third language, you understand perfectly that no matter how proficient, your accent will almost always trip you up among native speakers. You will also understand that your lesser degrees of perfection in accent will cause confusion and/or hilarity among an audience of native speakers.

But your friend who speaks six languages can always understand someone with a mispronunciation or poor accent or pronounced regional variation -- all because in learning six languages they became great listeners.

Many people make no effort to listen or to listen carefully. To a point, the longer someone speaks the more opportunity a listener has to understand and to discern some context.

Listening is a skill that sharpens up quickly with use.

R39 thank you for weighing in, that's interesting! My DDR friends I was referring to are all born around '75 and slightly earlier, to narrow it down. Yugoslavia was apparently a little different. Additional info: I have a friend born in the mid eighties from Armenia who learned zero English in school (He could't say "Hi" and "Bye") and made an effort to learn it now as an adult. Accents are hard to get rid of for most first generation immigrants. Ask any immigrant about their mum's or grandmother's accent.

This is like that high-class daughter-pimping madame Yolanda Hadid telling her staff to learn English "like she had to" then pretending not to know the word "cunnilingus". The western Netherlands have received BBC transmissions for the last 50 years and EVERYONE speaks perfect English - strangely, like her mother did.

I remember a video of her struggling to communicate with French elementary school kids. And French was supposedly one of the languages she spoke, learned when she was an international fashion model.

[quote]This. Any reasonable person whose spouse was head of state would try to improve her skills in the language of that state.

She's only reasonable when it comes to being paid to pretend she's his wife. And her price is far from reasonable.

Fuck Kreeeesmis!

R37 Yugoslavia was not a totalitarian police state like, say, East Germany. English programming and culture was pretty freely available.

Is their any evidence of her architectural 'training' before her FLOTUS role? Like a building? A hosue? A bathroom reno? The decorative stuff she did at the White House was just that, decorative, and likely conceptualized by staff to which she mumbled, 'okay'.

Hoo geevs a fack about kereemus !

Her language skills are as fictional as her passionate motherly devotion to anchor baby Barron.

BTW she also wasn’t an “international fashion model.” International fashion models don’t need to do nude portfolios.

I lived in this country for many years, darling, and I spoke perfect ENGLISH wiss out ze accent.

I sounded exactly like I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Pssst…Melania came to the U.S. on an Epstein Visa. It’s in the files.

[quote] Give it a break. Her accent and grammar is poor for someone who has been in the US for over 20 years.

Oh, dear. A thousand times over

"Is there any evidence of her architectural 'training' before her FLOTUS role? Like a building? A house? A bathroom reno?"

My God, are you daft? The entire Manhattan skyline is filled with her architectural works which the Trump Organization built.

The evidence is abundant. Just as it is for her modeling career.