This is the second time when I was teaching the first lesson of English, a student asked, 'Where do you come from?' He thought that I came from Singapore.
In another past occasion another student asked--again, in the first meeting of the term--if I was a native speaker. Also, after I ended my presentation in a speech contest in Bandung, juries said I must have been to the UK--I haven't.
These are all pretty funny. My pronunciation may be a contributing factor, but my vocabulary still doesn't cope with British slang at all.
And I do speak with different pronunciations inside and outside classroom--the latter is more relaxed, of course. I'm not to appear posh. But, just like a pianist who hones their skill over time, I need to meet the standard. After all, I love phonetics over grammar, human voice is my playground. What can a phonetician do better than working on accents?
And that's why I won't stop learning French until I'm mistaken for a Parisian. It's not about losing one's identity. It's about playing with identities.
Originally posted on Facebook on 8 June 2013.
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