How do you write a spanish accent? And broken English? A character of mine is from Venazuela and her husband is from mexico and English isn't their first language; they both have a difficult time with it.
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First things first, I’ve stated this a few times before and I’ll repeat it: don’t write accents in dialogues. It’s annoying to read and it usually only comes across as a stereotype, often with racist undertones. As a French speaker myself, having to read Fleur Delacour “zis iz” and “zat iz” aggravated me to no end.
Instead, just use the narration to describe the accent or simply state it is there.
Agnieszka said Colm’s name in her Polish accent and he smiled at the particular music she put into it.
As to broken English, you need to study the way non-native speakers of this particular language speak. The mistakes you make will depend very much on your original language and how advanced you are in English.
Speakers of roman languages like French and Spanish or Italian are unlikely to make that many verb mistakes for example, because roman tenses are more complex than English ones. However, roman languages are gendered, so you can sometimes hear beginners call objects “he” or “she” (you’ll want to check what the gender of that object is in the native language). In French, a table is a she for example. Don’t ask me why. However, be aware that in most such cases, these mistakes come from reflexes you’re trying to unlearn rather than lack of knowledge of the language. So they won’t be consistent. The speaker knows the table is an “it” in English, it’s one of the first things they’ve learnt in school.
I found a list of common mistakes Spanish speakers make here. I remember a Spanish friend of mine making a couple of these mistakes, but only a couple as her English was fairly advanced.
The “false friends” is definitely a big one. I’ve been a fluent English speaker for about 15 years now and I still occasionally catch myself saying “library” when I mean “bookshop”. On the flipside, I also do it more and more the other way around when I speak French for example saying “J’assume” when I mean “Je suppose”, when “assume” in French means taking responsibility for something and not assuming.
What I suggest you do, on top of googling “common mistakes Spanish speakers make in English” is just interacting with Spanish speakers. Maybe you can find a chatroom with Spanish speakers who are learning English? Then when you see mistakes, copy them down and see which ones keep coming back. And you can learn some Spanish too at the same time.
You can also check out the languages tag here and on my own blog if you want to see other posts about this.
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