OT: Off shore call center workers mad at American

[Alneyan]

I guess Spanish is needed because of the high number of Spanish people in the US right now, and some of these aren't quite exactly fond of English. You know, cater to your customers, and all that. Fluency in English is the norm here, and a third language is *recommended*.

Most foreigners that learn English in a formal setting have no trouble with "too/to", "their/there", "it's/its", and so on, because our learning is based on writing, and not speaking. I wouldn't say gender-based nouns or tenses are the main problems of French or Spanish: many learners get the articles wrong, but it will not affect comprehension (at least French doesn't have more than a few words with a gender-dependent meaning).

Pronunciation... now that's a funny thing, and possibly the hardest thing to learn. I have a few foreign-born teachers, and though their sentences are perfectly correct, and they have lived in France for a *long* while, some mistakes still sneak by. Comprehension is still perfectly possible, of course. French is a pretty odd language with regards to pronunciation: we have nearly random unvoiced letters that may or may not affect pronunciation, a perfectly regular stress on all our words (word stress is always on the last voiced vowel of the word), all words are stressed in a sentence, but there is a "rhythm", *some* words are linked in speech (the infamous liaison), and we have little love for diphtongs. Of course, other languages have their own pecularities.