How do you feel about your accent?

I was fourteen when I came to the US. I wasn’t immigrating then. I was spending a year in Oklahoma as a foreign exchange student. From Moscow to Oklahoma! Kansas and Oklahoma to be precise. I spend the summer in Wichita, Kansas, attending a language school, and then moved to Oklahoma, where I was placed in junior year at Enid High school. Why I was a junior — I have no idea. I was a lot younger than most kids. In both Kansas and Oklahoma I lived with a host family.

Before America, at my Russian school, we were taught British English. In America of course I had to abandon “I shall”, “how do you do?” and so on.

I then spent 8 years in England, attending boarding school, university, and working in London.

I drafted an entire memoir about my travels but this story is not about that. It’s about my journey of speaking English.

I don’t know the science behind our vocal abilities. Presumably, at a certain age, something changes and we lose the ability to be accent-free when learning a new language. Maybe it has something to do with puberty, maybe not. I know for a fact that fourteen was “too late” in my case. I speak fluent English of course but was never able to get rid of my accent. It’s not a typical Russian accent — the exaggerated kind you often hear in movies but an accent nonetheless.

I used to feel really insecure about it. I remember how on my first or second day of high school in Oklahoma for lunch break I went to a local diner. I shouldn’t have…