My husband has a friend, whom I like a lot too, and we invited him over for dinner and games last night. He's a great guy and we enjoy his company. He just has one habit that I'm wondering if there's a polite way to ask him to stop, or if I just have to deal.
He loves foreign languages and speaks several. On his previous visits, he kept saying things in Chinese, or saying things in English and then repeating them in Chinese. I didn't mind this *quite* so much as I'm attempting to learn Chinese, too. (He is not Chinese or of Chinese heritage, he's just been studying it for years.) It did get old after a while, though.
Last night it was Spanish. Apparently he's to attend a training exercise in a Spanish-speaking country for work, so he's practicing his Spanish. Unfortunately, neither my husband nor I speak Spanish well (we both took one year of it in high school, but he spent most of high school studying Latin and I studied French and Hebrew). Nonetheless, he either spoke in Spanish instead of English, or he'd say something in one language and then say the translation in the other language. This went on for the few while.
After dinner, we started playing a board game. He dropped the Spanish (mostly) during this time, although he did spend a while trying to translate all of the board game information into Spanish so he could keep track of his cards on his phone, which he'd converted to Spanish. But then he started speaking in an accent for the whole game, everything he said. It wasn't really a specific accent (at one point I guessed Australian, and he said it wasn't meant to be Australian, just a muddle). Since the game we were playing was sort of detective-related, I joked that I should start speaking in Hercule Poirot's accent while playing (but didn't).
Is there any polite wording that I could have used to ask him to stop speaking in accents without being too harsh? Would just saying, "Would you mind just speaking in your normal English accent for a while?" maybe adding light-heartedly, "My ears need a break," or something like that, do you think that would be okay to say? Or is there a gentler way or a hint I could give instead?