> there's no language barrier As a Brit who's spent a fair amount of time in the Midwest I beg to differ. One example I often came across was that I would inte

> there's no language barrier As a Brit who's spent a fair amount of time in the Midwest I beg to differ. One example I often came across was that I would interlace what I said with relatively subtle humour, as everyone does back home, but find that instead of conveying multiple meanings people would take everything in flat earnest, often being rather miffed and perplexed. On the other hand Americans would smack me in the face with their gregarious intonations and beaming white teeth whenever they thought they had something funny to say, something that grew more and more irritating and bizarre to me over my stay. It also bothered me that even close friends often struggled to understand my pretty typical London accent, when I've had to guzzle American speech patterns off of screens my entire life. The only British English dialect you could expect anyone to be familiar with was that off of 1960s TV shows like Monty bloody Python. Grrr.