4 ms·

This sounds ridiculous, but you'll be surprised how thwarted your average american is at accents. If someone wrote down the french words, I'm pretty sure grandm

This sounds ridiculous, but you'll be surprised how thwarted your average american is at accents. If someone wrote down the french words, I'm pretty sure grandma would've figured it out. I'm somewhat the defacto interviewer at my company for latino interviewees because of my time in south america. I don't even speak spanish barring enough to survive, but I can understand their english better than my peers. When they asked how I was understanding what they said, I didn't even realize I was the only one getting it. I think people in general should hang out in strange lands to get your brain to be more flexible to different kinds of inputs even if you don't plan learning a new language.

splonk 4y ago
Some of us just have a really bad ear for accents. I'm a native English speaker who's been to dozens of countries and have at least a passing knowledge of 4 languages, and I still have trouble with strong accents from the southern US, New York, and even my Indian coworkers that I've spoken to for years. I think it's some kind of bad aural signal processing in my case, since pretty low volumes of background noise can also screw up my comprehension of people I can normally understand.
- xeromal 4y ago
  Can definitely see that being an issue for many people. I think as long as a person is aware that demanding someone to speak English is the wrong attitude, most humans want to try to convey what they're saying. I'm kind of the opposite of you. My hearing is extremely sensitive to a fault and picks up more than I even want. I'll say that I'm easily overwhelmed when there is a lot of competing noise though.
- soco 4y ago
  I met this kind of situation in more than a few colleagues and a common observation was: they have these troubles only in their native language. Maybe we're stronger wired to that language+accent to be the language, and whatever else we learn is more flexible by definition because it's learned?

splonk 4y ago

Some of us just have a really bad ear for accents. I'm a native English speaker who's been to dozens of countries and have at least a passing knowledge of 4 languages, and I still have trouble with strong accents from the southern US, New York, and even my Indian coworkers that I've spoken to for years. I think it's some kind of bad aural signal processing in my case, since pretty low volumes of background noise can also screw up my comprehension of people I can normally understand.

xeromal 4y ago
Can definitely see that being an issue for many people. I think as long as a person is aware that demanding someone to speak English is the wrong attitude, most humans want to try to convey what they're saying. I'm kind of the opposite of you. My hearing is extremely sensitive to a fault and picks up more than I even want. I'll say that I'm easily overwhelmed when there is a lot of competing noise though.
soco 4y ago
I met this kind of situation in more than a few colleagues and a common observation was: they have these troubles only in their native language. Maybe we're stronger wired to that language+accent to be the language, and whatever else we learn is more flexible by definition because it's learned?