Love Melania, but I really wish she’d put some effort into enunciation, perhaps practicing? I have two foreign parents one of whom is russian, am foreign born and multi-lingual. Her english is worse than most europeans who have never lived here. I don’t get it, particularly because they keep saying she speaks multiple languages... unless she speaks them all equally bad.
Uh-oh. Prepare for incoming.
I agree with you, but yours is not a popular sentiment here on FR.
I can understand her just fine.
If required to choose between a FLOTUS with no accent who looks like an antique dump truck and one with a pronounced accent who looks like Melania...
She does not speak English poorly, she speaks English with an accent. Rather like someone from Alabama or Texas :)
Do you mean she speaks English with a pronounced accent or that her grammar and vocabulary are poor?
I speak Spanish, with no English accent. So much so that I have been asked what part of Mexico I was from. However, my vocabulary and grammar are not nearly as good. I knew a gentleman many years ago that was nearly perfect in grammar and vocabulary, he even preached in Spanish, but his accent, his pronunciation was terrible. He lived and worked among Mexicans for over 60 years and it never improved.
So I can believe that our First Lady speaks many languages, she just may not have the ability to mimic the different sounds that are made in different languages.
According to wiki, she speaks "English, French, Italian, German, Serbo-Croatian and her native Slovene.” I think we could stipulate that she is unlikely to have an accent in Slovene. But the quality of her speech in the other languages presumptively depends, first, on the age she learned them and secondly on the technique by which she was taught. Personally I have a nodding acquaintance with German, but I learned that smidgeon in High School and on my best day my pronunciation, say nothing of my vocabulary and grammar, would undoubtedly have made you laugh.On the age issue, John Adams thought that John Quincy Adams was a genius because he picked up Russian so much faster than his father. But of course, any Tom, Ivan, and Vladmir learns Russian flawlessly as children, by immersion.
In my defense as a monolingual American, the reality is that anyone whose first language isn’t English has good reason to select English as his/her second language. My daughter picked Russian and Japanese; nowadays one might select Chinese.
In Melania’s defense she was born in Czechoslovakia, which didn’t break up until 1990 when she was 20. She most likely didn’t have much chance to learn English before then, and also little opportunity for exposure to native English speakers before then. She came to America at age 26, and even then, her work visa was year-to-year until 2000. And her work certainly did not demand good English enunciation. So IMHO she was set up to learn “good enough” English. And then she met and married The Donald - and who was in a position to criticize her accent then??
. . . so what you see is what you get - no complaints there - but what you hear is also what you get.