What does English sound like to foreign ears? Is it a pleasant language to listen to?
I'm italian and I've been living in England the past few years.At school I studied French and German and I only started to understand English in my early 20s at university. When you don't understand english you barely feel the difference between american and british, and of course the local accents are even less noticeable. Everything sounds like an undistinguished mutter which it's not particularly pleasant but feels kind of "modern" compared to how italian sounds like to us.There was a time, in Italy, when lots of people pretend to sing english songs, because it was "cool", most of us were listening at them without understanding the lyrics and making them up with random sounds that resembled the original.For me the best example is "when all the saints go marchin' in", which I sang for an entire life as "uen ol de sen go macinin" (to be read with phonetical consistency, like italian).So, an italian singer decided to write an entire song made of "mock english" words: it has no sense at all, if not for the occasional "all right".Here it is, to give you an idea.