Tuan Eckert: He's like one of them! - The Americans [V]

One thing that bugs me is a huge hole in Tuan's cover story: if he had been brought to America at age 10, he would not have an accent. Now, Pasha probably wouldn't be able to tell, but presumably the Eckerts have told Tuan's story to the school he's enrolled in, and he could be asked about it by classmates. I know I would immediately start wondering about him if I he said he'd been brought over and still had an accent. It just doesn't happen that way. I know plenty of kids who were speaking unaccented English within a few months (although I realized much later in life that at least one friend in particular didn't have much vocabulary, which used to drive me nuts when we played Barbie and she would just repeat everything I said instead of responding).

My mother has been teaching ESL for years, and she's always said that with very few exceptions, almost anyone who started speaking English (in a full-submersion environment) under the age of at most 15 will not speak accented English. At 15 it's a little bit shaky -- you can almost tell people's ages at immigration by the amount of accent they have. My cousin, a work friend, and Lev Gorn (Arkady on this show) all have 15-year-old immigration accents, which is to say that you sometimes almost can't hear it, but it's still there.

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