Still speaking gibberish despite years of studying English.

[faa2010]

It has happened to me many times that some people who has English as "native language" don't understand me even though I have been learning and polishing my English for years.  A person who is not an English native, told me that I have a weird English, a very impatient person whom I can't still understand why she is an English teacher.

What do I do wrong?, why some people still don't understand me when I speak English?

[oxy60]

Boy, does this sound familiar!

Your writing is OK so it might be the sound of the vowels. English has only 46 different sounds so with a native English speaker we don't need to have a great deal of imagination to guess what you are saying. You only need to take a cab in NYC to test that theory.

Students in Spain who have taken English for years tell me I speak funny English! (I was born,  educated and have a university degree in the USA.)

Have you spoken to a real native English speaker? What do they say? Can they understand you?

Don't change anything about the way you speak until you have had some conversations with real speakers.

[thalbergmad]

What do I do wrong?, why some people still don't understand me when I speak English?

Such is the variation in accents, that there are a lot of English people that I cannot understand and a lot that could not understand me.

Thal

[oxy60]

How right you are, Thal. Because I spent a lot of time in London living in SW5 and working in W1 I seldom heard those difficult accents. What happens in English schools in Spain is often the teacher comes from one of those difficult accent backgrounds. They say they are from London but I have never heard their accent.