Dificuldades do sotaque português para um americano

Na minha opinião e pelo pouco que tenho ouvido/visto, o pessoal de língua inglesa, por exemplo, costuma trocar o feminino pelo masculino e vice-versa.

Pelo menos um inglês chegou a chocar a dona de casa, sua nora brasileira, quando foi perguntar se "o seu cozinho ia bem". Naturalmente, ele se referia à cozinha dela; já um americano, num fórum de discussão de português, colocou no tópico "Ajuda com palavara mal" (grifos meus). Isso mesmo, "... palavara mal". Na realidade, ele só queria explicações acerca de uma palavra desconhecida.

Desculpem-me se meus comentários não vêm ao caso, mas isso deixa em pauta algumas das pequenas dificuldades que o pessoal de língua inglesa chega a enfrentar no português.

Well, when I began studying Portuguese I read a lot of it before really listening. So you can imagine how bad my accent was--it was informed by my study of French in college. I never had much trouble with the nasal vowels (ão, ões, em, etc.) because French is full of nasal vowels and I learned to pronounce French better than average. One thing that really tripped me up was the semi-vowel in words like "senhor." I used to pronounce the "H" the American way-- so I would say something like "sen Hor," which doesn't make any sense. The most embarrassing mistake I made happened the first time I talked to my mother-in-law on the phone (I was in the United States, she was in Brazil.) I said, "Muito prazer, cenoura!" ("Pleased to meet you, carrot!") I don't think the woman ever forgave me.

My philosophy about accents is that as long as your pronunciation is understandable (for instance, you call a woman "senhora" instead of "cenoura") then you shouldn't worry about how you sound. A lot of my students in Brazil are overly concerned with their "sotaques" --so much so that they forget to study very important vocabulary and grammar. If you can pronounce a language perfectly, but you can't understand it or put together a simple sentence, then what use is it to you?