4 ms·

Being an academic, I often hang out with people of various nationalities, usually each with it's own english-based language, slightly modified by grammar quirks

by Drup 11y ago

Being an academic, I often hang out with people of various nationalities, usually each with it's own english-based language, slightly modified by grammar quirks and foreign vocabulary. A linguist friend call that "international english", which I like quite a lot. After a while, you can play "guess the nationality" based on the grammar quirks. And everyone is still easier to understand than Scottish people. :) I got lucky in that I learned english not only by reading, but also by watching a lot of series (both american and british). Watching english series with english subtitles was a huge help for me, and I think it's a decent way to learn nowadays, much more effective than english classes.

fridek 11y ago
I'm from Eastern Europe and I've heard from native speakers that we use perfect tenses more often than a native speak would. It is interesting to see how much easier it is to communicate with other non-natives in English than with natives. I always struggled with UK accent and considered the US version simpler. However it seems British have developed more tolerance for varying accents over time, while Americans have often trouble understanding anything I said. For them, there was only one version of any given word and I was not using it.
- kwhitefoot 11y ago
  Britain has had a lot of people immigrating to the country from all over the world for hundreds of years so a little tolerance in the biggest cities and towns is a necessity. But also accents used to vary dramatically over the British Isles so just talking to someone from the next county could require a little adjustment and conversing with a person from the other end of the country could be a very slow business. And of course the language and vocabulary evolves. I've been out of the UK for almost 30 years now and I find that a lot of current slang is completely incomprehensible on first hearing.

by Drup 11y ago

fridek 11y ago

I'm from Eastern Europe and I've heard from native speakers that we use perfect tenses more often than a native speak would. It is interesting to see how much easier it is to communicate with other non-natives in English than with natives. I always struggled with UK accent and considered the US version simpler. However it seems British have developed more tolerance for varying accents over time, while Americans have often trouble understanding anything I said. For them, there was only one version of any given word and I was not using it.

kwhitefoot 11y ago
Britain has had a lot of people immigrating to the country from all over the world for hundreds of years so a little tolerance in the biggest cities and towns is a necessity. But also accents used to vary dramatically over the British Isles so just talking to someone from the next county could require a little adjustment and conversing with a person from the other end of the country could be a very slow business. And of course the language and vocabulary evolves. I've been out of the UK for almost 30 years now and I find that a lot of current slang is completely incomprehensible on first hearing.