Spoonary wrote:In all the time I have been studying Spanish, I have, almost exclusively, focused on peninsular Spanish, having been taught this variety of the language throughout my formal education. I then started watching Spanish TV and listening to podcasts from Spain. Therefore, the Spanish I speak - my pronunciation and vocabulary choice - has always been essentially Spanish.
However, the more time I spend with my Argentinian tutor, watching/listening to media from Argentina and learning all manner of Argentine vocab and turns of phrase, the more chance this has of influencing the way I speak Spanish. I don't see any problem with this; in fact, I am having a great time enriching my vocabulary use and knowledge of Spanish as the widely-Spoken language it is. Plus, I don't think my 'language core' (to use Luca Lampariello's term) will be affected; I can't see myself switching to using seseo and voseo any time soon.
The problem arises when I start to think about aiming for some sort of 'near-native' level of Spanish proficiency. Can I really do that if half the words I use are Spanish and half of them Argentinian or from some other country? Does it really matter, given that I am not living in a country where Spanish is spoken natively and I am definitely still English, no matter how good my Spanish gets?
I dunno, what do you guys think? Has anyone had any experience diversifying or completely changing the Spanish (or any other language) accent/dialect they use?
I guess these are the things I think about when I can't sleep.
Reaching a level where you are virtually indistinguishable from a native without leaving your own country is definitely possible because I’ve met several people in Norway with that level of English. Of course, they were generally exposed to loads of English language media from early childhood onwards and started learning the language formally at a young age too.
I’ve also met people here who speak a sort of mixed Norwegian dialect because they moved during childhood and their speech ended up including features of both dialects. So, I don’t think mixing dialects is all that strange or bad. Of course, moving from one country to another is less common than moving within a single country, but I’m sure there are people out there that mix different dialects of Spanish too. They probably lean mostly toward one dialect, but include some features of the other.