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You can learn how to be better understood as a native speaker without having to go abroad or even speak to a lot of people using English as a second language.
by bogle 5y ago
You can learn how to be better understood as a native speaker without having to go abroad or even speak to a lot of people using English as a second language.
In the UK, live in a city like Birmingham, for instance, with a strong local accent and even, in some parts like the Black Country, a unique syntax, e.g. "How am ya?".
Now go live for a while in, for the sake of argument, Glasgow, with their own particular patois and accent.
Why does this article make me think the problem is perhaps mainly with those native English speakers who haven't been exposed much to their own language as it's spoken in the regions?
- ARandomerDude 5y agoEven easier: pick up an introductory Greek or Latin textbook. I didn't know English grammar until I bought a Greek book and worked through it on my own.
- stan_rogers 5y agoGreek and/or Latin will get you to "schoolbook English" grammar... which was deliberately designed to make learning Greek and Latin easier, and has only a distant relationship to the actual grammar of English.
- leoedin 5y agoConversely, I lived for a while with a Glaswegian who had moved to the South of England, having lived his whole life in Glasgow. It was interesting watching him realise that he had to moderate his speech, otherwise so much of what he said was lost. Over time, he stopped using some of the specifically regional stuff that nobody understood.
- ska 5y agoThis is complicated because Scots (distinct from Gaelic) is a language - with multiple dialects (you wouldn't speak Doric in Glasgow) - and people from Scotland freely intermix with English. If you've grown up there as an English speaker you may not even realized it until you move somewhere it isn't spoken, so lots of loan words etc. you are used to don't exist.