Recently reading David McCullough's fascinating book ,“The Greater Journey – Americans in Paris,” I was intrigued by this sentence (p 202): ”Except in infancy, he had never lived in Paris. As a consequence of schooling in Switzerland and Germany, he spoke French with a slight German accent...”
Who was he?
He was Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the improbable president of the Second Republic, and later emperor Napoleon III, who “...in 1830, having tried and failed in a ludicrously inept attempt to overthrow King Louis-Philippe, he had been exiled to the United States, where he stayed only briefly before settling in London. (Like Louis Philippe he spoke English with ease and, as Thomas Evans discovered, preferred conversing in English when he did not care to have others nearby understand what was said.)”(p203)
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As we had suggested in previous blog posts, Don't worry too much about your accent, Mouth Mechanics, Fluency, etc., a “native” accent may be desirable, but not necessary to speak your foreign language fluently and/or be successful in the foreign country.
After all – if Napoleon could become emperor of France with a (slight) German accent in his “native” French – you certainly should not give up learning the foreign language that you want to become fluent in!