Mother tongue

Accents are funny. An Italian accent in English sounds really nice. An Italian accent in Spanish sounds weird and not very nice at all. There's probably a distinction there between your native and non-native languages. American English doesn't sound nice to me, it's just what I'm used to and lots of other accents in English sound much nicer. Castilian Spanish is something I aspire to. It sounds nice to me, and almost no other accents in Spanish sound nice. Spanish people apparently think that Argentinian accents sound nice, but to me they just sound like gibberish.

Gringo accents are particularly painful to me, along the lines of hearing a recording of your own voice. But the worst of all, regardless of the origin of the accent, is other foreigners who speak Spanish much better than I do. The close Romance languages, like Portuguese and the Italian that started this rant, don't count. If you speak a close Romance language you can learn Spanish easily and that's an advantage I don't have and I don't make myself feel bad about it. But if your native language is not a Romance language, and especially if it's English, and you speak good Spanish, well, fuck you. (Except for my actual American friends who speak good Spanish... unfuck you guys.) It's not like it's a rare event; Barcelona is full of foreigners who speak Spanish way better than I do. And it's not like it's surprising; I know my Spanish isn't that good. But oh man does it bother me when I hear another gringo speaking much better Spanish than me. I think part of it is that there's a part of me that wants to believe that all my current problems with Spanish are just my being a nonnative speaker and therefore insurmountable. And gringos speaking good Spanish kill that stupid idea.