Your Argentine Accent In The Us. Feel Strange?

[TehDeej]

This is totally trivial. I'm back in The US for some time and spending as much time at language exchanges to keep in fighting shape with the spanish. I always feel a little strange speaking with Americans though. Between the "yeismo" double l's and vos and some of the vocabulary most Americans even with good Spanish skills sometimes don't understand me. Sometimes I stall and try to change to tu and it's really awkward. Thankfully I found an event with native speakers run by a Chilena and she didn't bat an eye when I called her vos. Has anybody else had experience with this?

And ahh man was I thrilled when a few weeks ago I met a girl and she called me vos. It turned out she lived a few blocks away from me in Belgrano.

 

[la_guachita]

When i go back to N. America the Mexicans think I'm Argentine, but a weird one because i don't sound quite like a native Argentine either.

 

[Ries]

I have to consciously switch back to mexican spanish when I order at the taco trucks, otherwise they get all confused.

 

[Jaredberryman]

The problem is that many of the people that go live in the U.S. have absolutely terrible Spanish. Many people that immigrate are uneducated, or their family was uneducated, so they are capable of having terrible Spanish. They would probably have a hard time understanding Spanish from Spain too. This isn't always true, but having traveled quite a bit in Latin America, I realize this is the case in the US many times.

 

[ajoknoblauch]

When i go back to N. America the Mexicans think I'm Argentine, but a weird one because i don't sound quite like a native Argentine either.

It happens to me, too. The Argentines can't guess where I'm from, so I tell them Thai or Vietnamese.

 

[PhilipDT]

I don't have any problem being understood in the US, I use vos (or usted) and everybody seems to understand me just fine, I don't use all that much lunfardo here or there, so I don't know how a mexican american would respond to being called a boludo.

On the other handI have a very hard time understanding a lot of mexicans who live in the US though, the accent is terrible! It seems very nasal, and slurred. Interestingly I don't seem to have this problem with the majority of my friends and acquaintances from el DF, maybe the accent is as different there as is the the Cordoba accent is here.

 

[Vagrant Violet]

No doubt... Back home in Ohio, there isn't a great deal of diversity. However, one day I went to a food court in a mall, and the cashier (who had a Spanish-speaker's accent in español as opposed to castellano) had hit the wrong button on the register and seemed a bit confused over how much change to give me. I didn't think twice when I told him in castellano how much he owed me as I had paid him with a $20 bill. I couldn't decipher his look as surprise, confusion, annoyance, or a combination. He never said a word back, he just gave me my change.

When I traveled Chile, it was a joke! I went with my Argentine husband to a store and asked the salesperson something about being able to pay with a credit card or something. Despite repeating myself more deliberately and clearly a second time, the guy probably had absolutely no clue what language I was speaking, let alone what I was asking. So my husband asked him the same question and got a response.

This continued for the duration of our stay. I recall ordering food, and as though I was playing the game "Telephone" with my husband, I whispered in his ear, "Decile que quiero unos paquetes de ketchup," to which he told the server, "Podrías darle un poco ketchup, por favor?"

Go figure!

 

[la_guachita]

The problem is that many of the people that go live in the U.S. have absolutely terrible Spanish. Many people that immigrate are uneducated, or their family was uneducated, so they are capable of having terrible Spanish. They would probably have a hard time understanding Spanish from Spain too. This isn't always true, but having traveled quite a bit in Latin America, I realize this is the case in the US many times.

This is true here too sometimes. I have an inconsiderate neighbor who for years has let her dog do his business on the shared terrace or in the hallway leading to my door instead of taking him for a walk. I've been cleaning up 'caca ajena' for years. One day the little yapper left me a present in front of my door and I asked her to please pick up her dog's feces. She didn't understand and I repeated myself twice before I finally used the word 'caca' instead of 'heces' and then she understood. I thought maybe it was my accent, but a local friend was with me and said my pronunciation was fine -- it was simply that the woman wasn't familiar with the word 'heces'. What can you expect from somebody so 'burra'?

 

[Gringoboy]

My ex used to have Spanish lessons off a Brit when we lived in Spain. He was a Spanish teacher at a very high level, but it used to irritate the hell out of him when I spoke in Argentine, particularly by using the preterite and different way with LL and Y and VOS etc. He really hated it.
In fact we fell out seriously over this issue because I wouldn't change my way of talking.

 

[sheawj]

I used to wonder how my son's Argentine Spanish would fair when we're back home. I blogged about it ages ago, and one of my readers said that her mom (I believe she is Chilean? Colombian? I'm sorry, but I don't remember) spoke differently than Mexicans but had zero problems. HOWEVER, people here that I know say that when they are in the US, the Spanish speakers there have no clue what the heck they're saying.
When my fiancee is in the Pacific Northwest, where I am from, she has the opportunity to speak quite a bit of Spanish. No one batted an eye, except one waiter who engaged her in conversation and asked where she was from.
So maybe it just depends on where you go.