Welcome to my Birthday Week during which I post random, interesting or embarrassing facts about myself. If you missed the introductory post, you can find it here. Today, I’ll be wrapping up the birthday week. I know it’s a bit of cheating, since it’s only day 5, but I hope today’s surprise will make up for it.
I was thinking about something special to put up here as a way of saying “thank you” to all my readers, and here it is: a video! If you ever wondered what Melfka’s accent sounds like or how it would be like to meet me in person, you can get the taste! I’m even slightly nervous as I would be in a real life meeting.
Since I’m not a Youtuber and I don’t usually record podcasts or videos, I couldn’t get anything decent when it comes to the quality. The video was shot on my old and cranky phone, so I didn’t get to edit it and the sound is quite bad. I apologize for that, but I had a choice: share this video with you or share nothing. As you can see, I chose the former.
So, I hope you’ll enjoy it!
Melfka’s accent
Since this topic is going to come up, let me talk a bit about my accent.
When I was studying English language back in Poland, the teachers would focus on the British accent, so-called Received Pronunciation (RP) standard. I haven’t picked up much of it, or rather—whatever I picked up, didn’t really stick, and I still had my partially Polish accent.
When I moved over to Ireland, I worked mostly with multinationals, so even though I was exposed to Irish accent from time to time and liked the sound of it, it felt artificial to try to adapt to it. Besides, shortly after my move, I met my future husband, Inq. He’s American and wasn’t shy of correcting my English grammar and vocabulary, helping me to get better. As we talked almost daily. I slowly adapted to his way of speaking. As you can hear, I still have a bit of a foreign accent, but that aside I’m definitely more in the American department than the British one.
Which, one day back in Ireland, led to an amusing conversation. A stranger asked me once where I was from. I did say “Poland” and he looked at me suspiciously. “Are you sure?” he inquired. “Not from the States or Canada?” Of course, I was sure where I was from, but that memory still makes me giggle.
This concludes Melfka’s Birthday Week. I hope you enjoyed the entries. If you missed some of them, here’s the full list:
- Melfka’s Birthday Week 2018: Introduction
- The Sweet Tooth Witch
- All the Pretty Dragonflies
- Those Horror Things
- Melfka’s Accent (this post)
XD I love those kinds of questions “are you sure where you’re from” would have been the ideal opportunity to go, oh no! I forgot, I’m actually Swedish
Yeah. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I changed my mind. I’m not Polish, I’ll be… Irish.” 😉
XD
Oh what a joy to hear your voice! You sound lovely and I loved watching your face and your expression as you talked to us. I hope your birthday has been a wonderful one and this year really special:).
I’m glad you enjoyed it! It’s not as good as meeting in person, but I thought it would be something different. I had to record it twice and was on the verge of not sharing it, since I couldn’t edit the video for the sound. Now I’m glad I did.
I’m glad you did, too:)). I’ll have to do the same thing, one of these days!
Please do! I’d be looking forward to it. 🙂
I loved this! It was great to hear your voice, Joanna. 🙂
Accents are funny things, aren’t they? We have a very distinct accent here in Massachusetts that’s known as the Bostonian accent (lots of substituting the “ah” sound for certain r’s, like “cah” / “car” and “yahd” / “yard”). But even though I’ve grown up with family who have that accent, I don’t have it myself. And I still haven’t figured out how that happened…
I’m glad you liked it, Sara. 🙂 As I wrote below, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to post this one, so it’s good to see that people enjoyed it. 🙂
The shock of the evening – Melfka actually talks …
Mostly to herself and when no one is looking… 😉