9 ms·

I'm a native English speaker who's lived in other countries a lot and speaks three languages, now trying to learn a fourth. The weirdness of "English" is some

• heurisko 5y ago
  > And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other languages as well) I think there are differences in accent, but I don't recognise anywhere as being "pretty much incomprehensible". I speak "standard" German as a foreigner, and have definitely found dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible". I haven't found differences to such a degree in English.
  • meepmorp 5y ago
    > I haven't found such differences in English. Find yourself a native Glaswegian to chat with, and see if you still feel the same way.
    • sime2009 5y ago
      I was in Glasgow years ago for a conference. Wonderfully friendly locals, I didn't understand a word they said.
    • mnw21cam 5y ago
      My brother's wife is from the Shetland islands. He'd always know when she was on the phone to her family, because she would drop straight into the dialect without realising it. The thing is, the Shetlanders know that their dialect is sufficiently different, so they learn TV English as well so they can make themselves understood to outsiders.
    • gadders 5y ago
      I had it happen to me with a taxi driver in Newcastle.
    • StavrosK 5y ago
      Obligatory Limmy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YfRbNipdOg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YfRbNipdOg NSFW language, if you can understand it.
      • dmnd 5y ago
        also hilarious if you can understand it
        • StavrosK 5y ago
          I've watched the entire show 4 times and can understand everything by now, but I still can't say I get the humour.
          • grozzle 5y ago
            Limmy's humour is wilfully niche even among Scots and the Scots-adjacent. He has no intention of appealing to a wide audience. He's a great example of Twitch being good at finding an audience for the long tail of creators.
    • heurisko 5y ago
      I wouldn't find them "pretty much incomprehensible", although there might be one or two variations in accent or words that we might trip over once or twice. It would be much different experience from speaking with someone with a different German dialect, so I'd feel the same.
  • biztos 5y ago
    If you mean in English, I would say look to the poorer corners of blighty, or deep enough into Australia, and you may find what you need. Or, if you're in Los Angeles and white, ride the bus from Santa Monica to DTLA on any given weekend and just listen to people talk: that's English just as sure as mine is, but I get maybe half. (Also, is Scots not a dialect of English? I'm not sure -- a mix at the very least. Great tutorials on TikTok for that as it's apparently endangered.) If you mean German, haha that's easy, just go to Switzerland with a short stop in Swabia on the way, though in both places you'll have to practically beg people to speak their native tongue in front of a foreigner. The Swiss Germans especially will reflexively speak one of the major foreign tongues, namely Hochdeutsch or English, though in my experience the Swabians will still say stuff like schaffe gell and assume you can grok it since Germans know that much from TV.
    • mbg721 5y ago
      For the benefit of confused Americans like myself: English as it is spoken in Scotland, Scots, and Scots Gaelic are three different things.
      • biztos 5y ago
        Interesting, I think Wikipedia is saying it's a distinct language that shares a lot of words etc with English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language And I admit I have no idea where the line is between a dialect, and that.
        • meepmorp 5y ago
          > And I admit I have no idea where the line is between a dialect, and that. It's usually based around a combination of factor - mutual intelligibility, orthographic conventions, etc. Also, of course, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
    • ghaff 5y ago
  • fsniper 5y ago
    I moved to Ireland 4 years ago. And for at least 2 years, I could not understand ( or hear ) a word my - not direct - Irish manager said. It was alien to me.
    • anotherhue 5y ago
      And you probably got off lightly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pit0OkNp7s8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pit0OkNp7s8
      • fsniper 5y ago
        Ha ha :) That video is priceless. And I experienced this first hand. If you get 5 or more kms outside Dublin, people start sounding gibberish.
        • randompwd 5y ago
          > If you get 5 or more kms outside Dublin, people start sounding gibberish. What a dumb and ignorant thing to say.
          • angry_octet 5y ago
            It comes across as more egocentric than "I had difficulty understanding them," but it is often the case that away from the more international areas it can become really difficult to understand the locals, whether that is rural Eire, Picardy or West Virginia.
          • fsniper 5y ago
            Sorry If I sounded that way. As it's clear I am not native and meant "I can unfortunately hear gibberish with my untrained ears", not "they don't know how to speak proper". It's my dumbness.
  • Bayart 5y ago
    What English speakers refer to as dialects is milder than what other languages do, as English wiped all of its actual dialects out pretty early on. On the other hand, what's called in German a dialect might often be considered a language by linguists.
  • hervature 5y ago
    Does Newfinese fit the bill? Particularly the older generation. Listen to the first 10 seconds of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvnDy7PXiTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvnDy7PXiTc Part of the imcomprehensibility stems from their wide use of sayings that aren’t really deductible. “Who knit ya?” is “who are your parents?” It makes sense in retrospect, but I don’t think many people would think that in retrospect.
  • hcayless 5y ago
    When my father (who had a Midlands-ish English accent) met my father-in-law (strong NC Appalachian accent), they could not at first understand each other. It was pretty funny.
  • nkrisc 5y ago
    You can definitely find dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible" in the US just by traveling around Appalachia.
    • xxpor 5y ago
      I'd never had a problem understanding a native English speaker from the US until I met a truck driver from eastern KY. Couldn't understand a single word he said. He was driving with his wife, who translated for him.
  • TchoBeer 5y ago
    I grew up in an orthodox jewish community pretty near an even more, what might be termed "ultra orthodox" jewish community, and the dialect of english spoken there would probably be incomprehensible to native english speakers, both because of all the yiddishisms and also because of the accent.
    • angry_octet 5y ago
      I'm curious as to whether the practice of ultra orthodox men moving to a different community to marry does anything to standardise the Hebrew/English/Yiddish dialects between different communities/countries.
• yosito 5y ago
  > For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it. I know plenty of people who haven't "lived in English" before they're able to speak it. But I don't think English is much different than other languages in that the most effective way to learn it is to use it.
  • biztos 5y ago
    Sorry, I should have emphasized really. Compared to the other languages I know, the difference between "school English" and "English on the street" is larger. But of course the other two (German and Hungarian) could be exceptions! I have heard the same thing said of Spanish, at least as spoken by the working class in Madrid.
    • yosito 5y ago
      I just noticed your username is Hungarian for sure. Pun intended. :) If you've spoken to a lot of Hungarians, as I have, I think some of the distance between "school English" and "street English" for Hungarians has to do with the distance between English and Hungarian. I haven't noticed any school/street difference with Germans speaking English. Most of the Germans I've met I could swear speak English as a first language. For what it's worth, I speak intermediate "school Hungarian", but "street Hungarian" still feels a lifetime away for me. When I learned Spanish I feel like I went from "school Spanish" to "street Spanish" in 3-5 months.
• awillen 5y ago
  What languages do you speak? I speak Spanish and have been learning Polish for a few years because my wife's family immigrated from there, and many are still in Poland, with some only speaking Polish... can't have the in-laws talking trash without me knowing :) Spanish is generally straightforward and consistent, though the huge number of dialects can be a challenge for practical communication. Polish is a goddamn nightmare. I thought English was bad, but hoo-boy, Polish haunts my dreams. To say it is needlessly complex is an understatement. You have to change the endings of adjectives/nouns to match the context, so you end up with a ridiculous number of forms of each word. "Dog" is pies (pronounced pee-yes, sorta). Unless you use it in the sentence "I have a dog," in which case it is psa (puh-sah, again, sorta... I don't even know how to type out some of the sounds phonetically). If you say "Cooper is my dog" then it's psem. Depending on who you ask, there's somewhere between twelve and twenty ways to say the word two in Polish (and just to be clear, most of these counts don't include things like both, pair, etc. - just literally the word two). Then there's the specificity of the verbs of movement. Oh my dear lord - the verbs of movement. You see, you can never say that you went somewhere or that you're going somewhere. You must specify how. Always. You cannot go to Poland, you must fly to Poland. And every verb of movement has at least two, usually three forms. To fly is latac or leciec or poleciec, depending on whether you flew once, you flew regularly, or you were flying when something happened. The last one is a situation in English that we'd just handle with a form of "to be" and a gerund - "I was flying when..." In Polish, you have to memorize a specific version of each verb for that form. Add to that the fact that my Polish teacher's explanation for many things is "there's no rule, you just have to learn what sounds right." In one case, if you have a masculine noun you must either add an a or a u on the end. There is no rule for which. It's like they designed the whole thing just to be a nightmare for any non-native speaker trying to learn it.
  • me_me_me 5y ago
    > Add to that the fact that my Polish teacher's explanation for many things is "there's no rule, you just have to learn what sounds right." In one case, if you have a masculine noun you must either add an a or a u on the end. There is no rule for which. I can only sympathise with you, but that is the thing. As native speaker you just know when the words sounds good or off. One good thing is that you can always read Polish words phonetically. The notation to sounds is always the same. So its something :)
• xwolfi 5y ago
  I think English has large advantages over other languages. I'm French and live in Hong Kong, and the superiority of English vs both French and Cantonese is hard to deny. You say the spelling is irrational, I challenge you to find reason in the Chinese spelling, and the French one is full of traps due to our insane obsession with keeping our Latin root intact in spelling but not in verbal French. The genders make little sense in French, serve little purpose but constitute an immense barrier to a new learner. My wife will never, in her entire life, remember a table is a girl but a bridge is a boy. Because of that, she'll always sound like an idiot. My daughter might, but she hates French already and is incredible in English. Cantonese, or any Chinese variant, has large issues with temporality while English finds the right balance between having several tenses but not the idiotic amount French would have. I don't know, coming from a romance and an asian experience, English really is a good language you should be proud of. The pronunciation, sure, I'll always sound French, but that's a small problem compared to the vast advantage learning to read it provided me around 16 yo. Learn French at 16 yo and see if you move from the countryside of Normandy to an IB in Hong Kong thanks to it :D
  • kosievdmerwe 5y ago
    Japanese takes the Chinese writing system and makes it even worse.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY
• e17 5y ago
  It's not true that one cannot hear race in British accents, it is actually quite overt. I've lived in London and Manchester and the vast majority of established Black British and South Asian British communities do speak with a noticeably different accent to other ethnicities of the same economic class living nearby. The type of London accent mostly influenced by Caribbeans since the 60s even has a proper name - Multiethnic London English
  • twic 5y ago
    This is heavily tied up with class, though. My middle-class professional second-generation Indian and Pakistani acquantiances speak in a way that i don't think i could distinguish from the way middle-class professional white people speak. Meanwhile, if you visit ends where Multiethnic London English is widely spoken, you'll meet white people who speak it too.
• 908B64B197 5y ago
  > And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot of things, many of the sounds are not pronounced at all, or pronounced differently, in different countries. That's because we use the Latin alphabet for it, but it clearly wasn't mean to encode English. Contrast it with Italian, for which after learning the basic pronunciation of letters you can pretty much read out loud any words and be understood.
  • anoncake 5y ago
    You could still properly encode English using Latin by using more digraphs and trigraphs.
• Dumblydorr 5y ago
  I'd take our spelling system over Chinese characters or hieroglyphics any day. English has weird exceptions but with spell check and autocorrect, I think it's manageable. Their they're there, where we're were, there are many bad combos that unfortunately do need memorization.
  • JCharante 5y ago
    Chinese does have autocorrect and spell check based on statistical analysis of how often words are next to each other. Another benefit of such a system is that it's similar to romance languages where when characters are used in different languages, even though they are pronounced differently there is some mutual intelligibility. I don't speak french or portuguese but when reading the ingredients list (which they always put a sticker over the English section to show the local language) I'll use my Spanish knowledge to know what's inside.
• kkoncevicius 5y ago
  The part about spelling being inconsistent with how it sounds is likely due to "great vowel shift" [1]. My native language is Lithuanian and I always saw English words as sounding weird. However when I learned about the vowel shift and listened to some examples - the words from before sounded exactly like someone would pronounce them while reading in Lithuanian. In fact majority of pupils learning English for the first time would mis-pronounce the written words in exact same manner as they were supposed to sound before the vowel shift. Try listening to some of the soundfiles on that page ("bite", "mate", "boot", etc) and see how much more consistent they were. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
• walshemj 5y ago
  I could see some one who learnt formal English in a school setting in another country might struggle with Geordie, a strong scots English or full "Yam Yam"