The Sound of English

Nadia and I were chatting on the phone this afternoon, and I shared with her one of the great realizations I had this week.

I will never be able to hear the way English sounds to a non-speaker.

Never. Nunca. Jamás.

Like usual, Nadia laughed at both the thought of the idea and the fact that I'm a little sad about this. She tried to give me examples from other languages and even offered to have her mom tell me what it's like. Yet, not even that will fix this problem. The point is that I will never be able to hear with my own ears the sounds of English as a foreign language.

Sigh.

So I wonder how I would react to it. Would I laugh? Would I cringe? Would I tune out the sounds of morphemes and phonemes? Would I fall in love with it just because it was different from what I already know?

Thinking about this now makes my brain feel the same as it does when I try to imagine the size of the universe or the infinity of time. I know it's there. I want to understand it. I hate that it's impossible.

I'll never know.