I sometimes abuse ampersands

Ironically, I feel like my English is becoming worse by the day :) I mostly hang out with fellow international grad students, and we exchange speech peculiarities like whoa (my Ukrainian accent probably has an Arabic & Chinese tint to it by now), but even when I'm talking to native speakers, getting my point across is the thing that matters, not stylistic subtleties. The same goes for the accent: I bothered with phonetics (and felt insecure) for the first month; then I switched to a laid-back "most people understand me most of the time? ok fine moving on."

At this point, I sound more or less like Alex from Everything is Illuminated :)