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I wonder if taught English is more standardised than native English. I can certainly think of things I hear regularly that might surprise even a native speaker.
by stordoff 11y ago
I wonder if taught English is more standardised than native English. I can certainly think of things I hear regularly that might surprise even a native speaker. Couple of examples:
- The informal form of 'you' persists to some extent in parts of Yorkshire - "Where are you going?" often becomes "Where's tha goin'?"
- There is slang that I rarely hear outside of my immediate family (though I suspect it's more common than I realise) - "seef" for example (from "see if"), "I was seeing if it was in the car" is almost always "I was seefing it was in the car"
- prewett 11y agoI think it is because non-native speakers all learn the same basic 1000 words (initially) and same most-frequently-used grammatical patterns. Native speakers know thousands more words and all the colloquial phrases. I can understand foreigners (Americans, anyway) speaking Chinese pretty easily, because we all know the same (limited) vocabulary and grammar. I have real trouble with native speakers because they use all the short forms of the words and the grammar patterns that you don't learn initially.