4 ms·
How is your accent? I literally cannot understand many Indian people (who were born and raised in India, thus developing their accents there), and I suspect I'm
by badpun 8y ago
How is your accent? I literally cannot understand many Indian people (who were born and raised in India, thus developing their accents there), and I suspect I'm not alone. Are the interviewers asking you to repeat what you said, or to get closer to the mic etc.?
- mightymosquito 8y agoCommunication is pretty much sorted for me. I know exactly what you mean and do see people around me struggle with it. But I have never had people tell me to repeat my sentences or get closer to the mic etc. (Well it might have been because of the internet connectivity etc. but never because of my accent) I lived in the US for 2 years as a kid, so have a pretty neutral accent.
- nimzo33 8y agoIt may be partly because india is looked at having lesser talented developers (in the sense of questioning things, speaking up, really thoroughly thinking before starting to do your work and if it makes sense), while i know this is not always true it seems to be for majority from my experience
- dominotw 8y agoI highly doubt living in USA for 2 yrs neutalized your accent. How do you know for sure?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- taejo 8y agoTwo years as a child could be plenty to develop a local accent. I know people who lived in Germany for less than that time (usually because of US military parents) and return to Germany after decades of not speaking the language at all with near perfect accents. The combination of excellent accent with barely-existent grammar and vocabulary can be quite funny.
- dominotw 8y agogerman has very similar sounds to english though. The sounds of English and German are similar, as are stress and intonation patterns.Also, accent is not just sounds its also culture. germany and us have similar cultures. What exactly is neutral accent, I don't know what that even means.
- objectivetruth 8y agoI presumed it meant roughly halfway between "indistinguishable from native-born American speaking General American" and "Typical ESL accent for people who were born in India." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American
- cm2012 8y agoMy wife lived in Korea as a child for 3 years, and has a perfect korean accent to this day (we visited korean recently, people were surprised she was actually American)
- hirundo 8y agoI struggle with this problem daily at work. The whole company is remote and we have a new team of excellent developers from India. But in group meetings, while I listen hard I can rarely make out what they say. When my name comes up in a group conversation my standard answer has become, please describe the issue via email or slack. It's no use asking them to repeat themselves or to talk more slowly. To me it's yet another reason why I prefer async means of conversation over live meetings. I'm hoping that I'll learn to understand the accent after more experience with it, but if that's happening, it's slow going. Maybe there's a more systematic way to go about it, like finding books, podcasts, etc., spoken in strong Indian accents to practice with. Or even learning a little of their language to get experience with their cadence, etc. If I can learn a new computer language dammit, I should be able to learn to decipher the accent of people who are speaking my birth language coherently, with better grammar than I do.
- antirez 8y agoI've the same problem, but reversed: since I know my strong Italian accent can be hard for people to understand, especially in phone calls, I often ask if we can instead have a chat. But people rarely accept, with the result of having a hard time understanding each other.