I am also perpetually frustrated at how intolerant my francophone friends are with my French. Sometimes people I meet for the first time tell me that I speak with such a good accent it's only well into the conversation when they realize I'm not a native speaker. But my good friends have no shame in correcting my often not-quite-correct vowel sounds. "Bossie, it's not an e, it's an eeeuh." Or gender: "It's not un répétiton, it's une répétition. Seriously, to-may-to, to-mah-to. I'm a North American married to Brit and we have developed our own hybrid accent in the household. I have a pretty liberal attitude towards how many acceptable ways there are to pronounce vowels.


I work in English with almost exclusively non-native speakers with a large variety of accents and fluency, and some of the pronunciations I hear are interesting, but I always understand them and NEVER correct anyone unless they are so far off people might think they mean something else. I also don't care at all that they don't speak English perfectly.