Accents are complicated, but as a general rule, you end up stuck with whatever your brain has learned by age 14. Stephen Pinker has a story about Henry Kissinger and his brother moving to the US just before and after that threshold, one having a German accent and the other doesn't.
Most foreigners never lose their accent, while children of non-native speakers learn the local language without their parents' accent. Natives of Germanic languages, as someone else pointed out, tend to be better at English than natives of Romance languages. And some native Greeks can speak with such a perfect Spanish accent that when their vocabulary lags behind they sound slightly aphasic (until they tell you that they are actually learning the language).
It also depends education: Portugal and Greece used subtitles on tv whereas France, Spain and Germany usually dub foreign films. This makes a difference between the students from those nationalities one encounters, say, in Britain.
I know of a Japanese whose Spanish, learned in a couple of years as an adult, has far less Japanese accent than his English, learned and practiced since primary school.
And now that I'm at it: as with the deaf/mute confusion, when teaching, or just speaking, to a non-native speaker, remember that, rather than having a sticky tongue, they might just not be able to hear the sounds you are saying. This causes much frustration because you repeat the same word ten times, assuming that they can hear the difference, but they cannot. The solution is to point out explicitly in which sound the difference occurs.
Apologies for the dogmatic speech, it's the foreign-sounding generalisation I have a general perception that Europeans are generally excellent at English that triggered it :-)
"Stephen Pinker has a story about Henry Kissinger and his brother moving to the US just before and after that threshold, one having a German accent and the other doesn't."
It could also be that one was more motivated to change the accent, or otherwise got more practice, than the other.
But never mind that possibility, because Stephen Pinker is a fundamentalist about nativism.
My accent is labile. It changes based on where I am in the world and who I'm talking to. This can be embarrassing sometimes but it comes in handy when learning to speak new languages. I'm well passed 14 btw.
> you end up stuck with whatever your brain has learned by age 14
I very strongly doubt this is true and I must object because this holds up the old alleged "fact" that at a certain age "you're just too old" to learn something new and I detest this with a passion.
Off the top of my head, Gary Marcus' "Guitar Zero" does an excellent job of de-bunking this.
This is a fact for many brain functions like vision for example. If you are born with a ocular birth defect and your eyes are not surgically corrected early enough after birth you will be blind for life.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period
We were talking accents and ability to learn new languages or skills here, not birth defects - the one doesn't have anything to do with the other unless it is a form of direct speech impediment....
I mentioned the birth defect as simply an example of how they discovered there is a critical developmental period for vision.
As far as critical developmental periods for people without birth defects, there are many accounts of feral children that were never able to learn speech. There really is evidence for a critical developmental period for speech functions.
Most foreigners never lose their accent, while children of non-native speakers learn the local language without their parents' accent. Natives of Germanic languages, as someone else pointed out, tend to be better at English than natives of Romance languages. And some native Greeks can speak with such a perfect Spanish accent that when their vocabulary lags behind they sound slightly aphasic (until they tell you that they are actually learning the language).
It also depends education: Portugal and Greece used subtitles on tv whereas France, Spain and Germany usually dub foreign films. This makes a difference between the students from those nationalities one encounters, say, in Britain.
I know of a Japanese whose Spanish, learned in a couple of years as an adult, has far less Japanese accent than his English, learned and practiced since primary school.
And now that I'm at it: as with the deaf/mute confusion, when teaching, or just speaking, to a non-native speaker, remember that, rather than having a sticky tongue, they might just not be able to hear the sounds you are saying. This causes much frustration because you repeat the same word ten times, assuming that they can hear the difference, but they cannot. The solution is to point out explicitly in which sound the difference occurs.
Apologies for the dogmatic speech, it's the foreign-sounding generalisation I have a general perception that Europeans are generally excellent at English that triggered it :-)