OK - embarrassing story time!
When I first came to the U.S. I visited a friend in Boston, MA. We decided to make raclette. While he was at work, I thought I'd do the shopping. I walked into a supermarket, and asked for potatoes. The employee looked at me with a blank stare.
Him: "Huh?"
Me: "Yes, potatoes, do you have any potatoes?"
Him: "Do we have any ... whaaaat?"
Me: "Potatoes!" (getting slightly frustrated that he couldn't even understand a simple word)
Him: "I'm sorry - what? Toys?"
Suddenly I became very, very frustrated with myself not being able to communicate on the most basic level. How could my attempt at pronouncing "Potatoes" turn into him understanding "Toys" was just... completely beyond my understanding. I think we must have ended up having pizza that night.
But years later, that little indicent suddenly made sense.
See, in France, we don't care much about tonic accent. I mean it's there (or not), and it can mean various things depending on who's talking, or simply be a personal touch, but there's a huge freedom with them. Whereas in the U.S. the tonic accent is very important. You don't say oh-RANGE. You say OH-range. But I only learned that waaaaay later. And you don't say po-ta-TOES. You say po-TA-toes.
But my French-trained brain wasn't ready for that new layer of subtility. And in France there's one place where the tonic accent matters, it's at the end of a question. In fact we have a tendency to just add an accent, or lilt, at the end of every sentence. The pitch just rises up. So my question went something like:
"Do you have any po-ta-TOES?"
And all the employee could hear was probably "something-something-TOES?". Since he assumed I wasn't seriously looking to buy toes, he suggested his next best guess, "TOYS".
I have since learned to pronounce po-TA-toes and OH-range. Just don't ask me to say "error".
Oh and BTW, a study shows that even 2 day-old French babies put the little lilt at the end of the sentence!
Newborns Cry With An Accent, Study Finds - ABC News