: Re: How do I make an ESL character sound realistic? I have to write an assignment in which there's an English character talking with a English as a Second Language (ESL) character. It is turning

@Bryan361

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Not all ESL speakers will sound the same, for the simple reason that they all had a first language.

If you want to add realism, you need to determine what language they natively speak. Your native language shapes your ideas of tense, sentence structure, and what phonemes you're used to considering as actual word-sounds and not mere noise.

Some oriental languages have a sentence order distinct from English's subject-verb-object, and translate word-for-word without changing the order when they are just learning or stressed.
Some oriental languages do not have verb tenses. If so, they may not use tenses at all at first.
Many languages have built-in cultural hierarchies, such as the rendering of nouns in some romance language or the myriad social-order suffixes in Japanese. These may be strangely translated or even used directly.
Given the preponderance of English, it's likely that even a far-flung language has some loan-words taken from our tongue. There will be some words that the ESL student speaks and uses perfectly, because they don't have to be translated at all.
Finally, remember that the ESL speaker already has a wide vocabulary already at their disposal, and will almost certainly insert a term or phrase from their native tongue into their speech. Especially for under-their-breath utterances or exclamations.

While I agree with @Lauren -Ipsum's suggestion that you may want to audit a class, you may get as much or more traction out of taking a class in your character's first language than listening to a collection of ESL speakers who will all have their own native tongues.

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