kinda off topic, but one of the videos YouTube offered up as related to the above was this one:
(purports to be a Brit trying out an American accent, but definitely isn’t. Sounds about as British as Dick Van Dyke). If you know this, the comments become quite amusing.
Which actually isn’t all that far off. A friend of mine from Ecuador sometimes stumbled over English words, and when he did, I would ask him what the Spanish word was. More often than not, chopping off the -io and replacing it with -tion resulted in the correct word.
Along similar lines, this clip is from an episode of Frasier where the character Daphne Moon (played by English actress Jane Leeves) is trying to develop an American accent.
Daphne: You see, I’m just sick of people making such a fuss about my accent. I like to be able to blend in on occasion, so I’m learning to speak American.
Frasier: And who is your tutor, a drag queen?
Now I have no idea if that’s what American sounds like to someone from England or not, but it’s pretty funny.
Note: I tested that YouTube link, and for some reason it’s not taking me to the spot I have cued up which is at the 13m7s mark in the event you have to cue manually.
After his introductions in French, English, German, at 0:30 s, he starts with this:
I couldn’t find the ones I wanted, but that’ll do.
I can’t watch the clip from here, but this is interesting - because I always assumed I was watching an American actress playing a character with a British accent (in all the other episodes, not this one). Turns out the reason for this is that the actress who plays Daphne is from Essex, but affects a Manchester lilt when playing the Daphne character.
She does it reasonably well, but something about it isn’t quite right (I suspect it’ll be a consistency thing).
Perception and context is so important here (and in the unhijacked GQ topic here) - to a certain, quite surprising extent, what we see and hear is skewed by our expectations - for example, in the *Prisencolinensinainciusol *video with subtitles, I heard the words I was seeing in the subtitles - beforehand, they had been fairly unintelligible. EVP exploits the same effect and there is a famous psychological experiment that does too (the name of the experiment escapes me, but it involved people perceiving the emotion they were told to see in a series of photos of faces that were in fact, all the same).
The Prisencolinensinainciusol video is also interesting to me, because I don’t find it to sound like English - I think this is probably because it targets a subset of American vocal traits. To me, it just sounds like not-very-identifiable foreigners.
That’s because getting a nice flip trilled double “r” (perro, eg) is so damned hard, when I manage to pull one off I just relish it with pride.
I’m an English speaker and that sounds like my perception of Portuguese: lots of shhh’s. Is it doubly so for the Chinese?
Phonetically, it’s not similar; the Spanish r is a tap while the English retroflex r is quite unusual among languages. It is interesting however that they sound similar to you.
Spanish speakers have said to me that it’s difficult for them to pronounce my name “Dara” in English - two simple syllables but they find it hard to follow the “d” sound with an English-style “r”. Of course if they use a Spanish r it’s identical to the phrase “dar a”.
I’m not at all surprised that we English speakers exaggerate the Spanish r. I’m certainly guilty of that myself. For us, it is quite an effort to produce it in the first place so it probably tends to be a bit uncontrolled!
One thing I tried long ago was to turn the volume down on the radio until you can’t understand what they are saying but can still kindof hear them.
Doing that, it seems English has much ‘hissing’. I can where the grandmother in the OP is coming from.
This is my perception too, when I hear people speak portuguese is sounds like a ton of “zhhh” like a lot of people pronounce the “j” in Beijing or the “j” in Dijon.
It took me a minute to figure out that unlike the gibberish ones, this guy is actually speaking German, just with an American accent. I can pick out just enough to tell that he really is talking about giant burgers. “The biggest burger in the whole world!” “A giant portion of ribflesh in a bread roll with a cut in the middle!” 
Wish I could find a transcript for this.
Er, I mean “beef”. He’s saying “rindfleisch”, not “ribfleisch”. German translation fail. 
That’s because it’s actually a vowel-coloring, rather than a consonant proper. But North American English does have an /ɾ/ tap (or flap), in the middle of words like water.
Or they can just say it without r-coloring on the first syllable maybe? “Da ra” instead or “Dar a”? I guess it depends on how you yourself pronounce it.
Whenever I listen to low-quality recording of English dialog I often notice that the "S"es are often blown out and sound very “hissy”.
They end up being quite pronounced and distracting and I’m reminded of how often the sound occurs in our language. There are four of them in that last sentence and four in this one.
I can see why many non-English speakers call it “the hissing language”.
When I was studying in Quebec my host family’s matriarch tried to fake her way through faux-English and simply added -ich/-ish to the end of everything. Comprend-ich-moi?
Shrug, someone speaking Spanish at normal speeds would pronounce Dara and dar a about the same, words get strung together. The only people who pronounce a pause between dar and a are actors in language tapes, foreigners and people who want to prove to the world that they are more kult’red than the rest of us normally-pronouncing bozos.
Of course, there’s also the movie “Astérix chez les Bretons” that’s full of characters speaking Anglicised French with English accents.
Yes, the guy in the foreground is speaking German. The guy in the background is speaking English-sounding nonsense interspersed with American terms that Germans are familiar with. (He says “Golden Toast”, for example, which is a German brand of American-style white bread.)
And oh, it’s “rindfleisch” (“beef”), not “ribflesh”. 
Sorry—I responded to your first message before reading your second! :o
Here’s my best effort, including a translation. The sketch is cut off at the beginning so I couldn’t make out the first few words. Note that Rick Kavanian, the actor in the foreground, deliberately makes a lot of pronunciation and grammatical errors which I’ve preserved: