Oh, Popcorn - that's not what I meant! Of course that wouldn't bother anybody! I guess you'd just have to see people who do it to know what I mean. It drives everybody around her nuts!

But about Egyptian people trying to change their accents. I guess if I were learning Egyptian, I'd want to speak it like the Egyptians. I'd try my very best to pronounce all of the words correctly. When I try to speak Spanish to my Mexican patients, they can barely understand me because I pronounce the words so badly (as I'm looking each word up in the Spanish/English dictionary). So if I were to learn Spanish I would do my best to speak it with a Mexican accent. It wouldn't be that I was trying to be someone I wasn't - just that I was trying to be more understandable! Of course I do think the accent is beautiful, but that's beside the point!

I sometimes wonder how the American accent sounds to other people. I love to listen to French accents and the accents of people from Sri Lanka. They're just sooo pretty and romantic. But the German accent sounds harsh and gutteral to me. So - tell me! Is the American accent soft or harsh?