> After months it was still difficult to understand announcements in the subway.
Don't worry, native English speakers also have difficulties with this
Re:Parisian Accent in 1912
by GirkovArpa on Thursday January 14, 2021 @08:26PM
(#25785724)
push, p/eu/sh?
long, l/on/ng, l/an/ng?
Not quite, /eu/ in French is deeper, closer to /ö/ in German, I really can’t think of an English word with the same sound.
The /on/ nasal vowel is also approximated in “don’t” in some English accent, but again often imperfectly. In French, you don’t hear the n at all, whereas it is most often noticeable in “long”. AFAICT, the closest is /ão/ in Portuguese.
On the other hand French speaker can get confused by strange intonation or stresses. Also there are several sounds that do not exist in English (e.g. /eu/, /u/, and the nasals /an/, /on/, /in/, the /ill/ can be problematic as well). Approximations of these sounds are distracting and can be genuinely confusing. And contrary to some English accents you can’t count on properly stressed syllables to help carry the meaning.
During my time in New York I had the opposite problem. As a native French speaker with some English education (having lived in London), apparently people understood me without difficulty. On the other hand, it took me a while to get the meaning of what other people were saying without asking them to repeat. After months it was still difficult to understand announcements in the subway.