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Indeed, I remember being in Oxford in the 90s and an older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said. My ex-wife, wh
by dhosek 8mo ago
Indeed, I remember being in Oxford in the 90s and an older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said. My ex-wife, who’s an ESL speaker who speaks fluently and without an accent has trouble with English accents in general. Similarly, in Spanish, I find it’s generally easier for me to understand Spanish speakers than Mexican speakers even though I learned Mexican Spanish in school and it’s been my primary exposure to the language. Likewise, I generally have an easier time understanding South American speakers than Caribbean speakers and both sound little like Mexican Spanish. (The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.)
Accents have diverged a lot over time and as I recall, American English (particularly the mid-Atlantic seaboard variety) is closer to what Shakespeare and his cohort spoke than the standard BBC accent employed in most contemporary Shakespeare productions).
- JasonADrury 8mo agoI live in London, I can drive a little over an hour from where I live and hardly understand the people working at the petrol station. A few more hours and they start to speak French.
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- nimbleal 8mo agoHmmmm. Which direction are you driving in where you can hardly understand them? I don’t think there’s a regional accent in the whole of the UK that’s “hardly understandable” spoken by anyone under 80 years old, let alone an hour from London. Especially where the conversation isn’t “in group”
- pjc50 8mo agoI have had to interpret between an Ulsterman and a South African, who were both speaking English. I think those accents have vowel shifted in opposite directions. I was also taught a bit of Chaucer (died 1400) in English at school. Although not any of the naughty bits.
- aardvark179 8mo agoHaving interpreted for a guy speaking with a broad Glaswegian accent on the east coast main line, I can totally believe this.
- noosphr 8mo agoMy funniest moment working in Singapore was translating between an Indian and a Chinese co-worker. The translation was repeating what each said in English in English.
- halapro 8mo agoThis sounds like a Hot Fuzz scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw
- clw8 8mo agoI imagine a current generation high school English class would be giggling right from the first line about gooning while on pilgrimages.
- NooneAtAll3 8mo ago> older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc ?
- mh- 8mo agoI was expecting the hooligans from Eurotrip.
- Oreb 8mo ago> The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers. Are you sure this is because of their accent? I have the same experience with French (the non-native speakers are easier to understand), but I always thought that was because they use fewer and simpler words.
- lefra 8mo agoAs an ESL I'd say it depends on the native language of who's speaking. I'll have no trouble with a thick spanish, italian or romanian language (I'm french), but indians speaking english are completely incomprehensible to me.
- VorpalWay 8mo agoIt took months of being exposed to Indian English on a regular basis for me to start to understand it (and I still find it requires significant mental effort). Context: I'm a Swede who regularly thinks and dreams in English (and when I did an English language test for exchange student purposes I got top marks in all categories).
- pavel_lishin 8mo agoMy college had a lot of Indian & Pakistani students & instructors, and the first few semesters were rough, but by junior year, their accents were totally understandable to me. It was a very useful experience to have, as someone who became a software developer. I wonder what they thought of my Russian accent.
- quadrifoliate 8mo agoIf you want to be able to understand them, you should probably stop thinking of them as a monolithic groupd of "Indians". Individual states in India are comparable in size and greater in population than Spain or Italy; and some cities and their suburbs are comparable to Romania. Overall, India's population is more than 3x that of Europe. A lot of Indians have English that's influenced by the specific region they come from and the native language. A couple examples: - Specific regions of Northwestern India have the "e-" prefixing (e.g. "stop" turns into "estop") while speaking English - Southern Indians tend to y-prefix due to their native languages having more of that sound (e.g. "LLM" can turn into "yell-ell-em").
- tayo42 8mo agoWho taught you Mexican Spanish in school? Im always hearing about how Spanish speakers not from Spain struggle with Spanish in school. You didn't learn vosostros?
- kstrauser 8mo agoDifferent person, but I learned Mexican Spanish in school. The teacher taught us vosotros “for the test, and it’s not any harder than the others once you learn it, so might as well, but you’ll never need this again unless you go to Europe”. She seems to have been right. To this day, I’ve never needed vosotros.
- well_actulily 8mo agoAnecdata, but I took Spanish all four years in high school in Southern California—I knew of vosotros, but was never really taught it
- lqstuart 8mo agoI think I read it's more "hillbilly" English that sounds like Shakespeare? Like coal mining towns where words like "deer" and "bear" are two syllables. Probably a combination of that and eastern seaboard. I only learned recently that the vowel shift and non-rhotic R's in Britain happened after the colonization of America. Americans still talk "normally" whereas the English got weird. Also why Irish accents sound closer to American than British I think. Linguistics is cool
- clw8 8mo agoAlso why the non-rhotic American accents are all by the East Coast, they were influenced by the non-rhotic British visitors while the inland areas were spared.
- ranger_danger 8mo agoI didn't think it was possible to speak "without an accent."
- bityard 8mo agoIt depends on who you ask. There is a "dialect" called General American English, which is essentially how national news anchors and some actors are trained, so that they don't sound like they are too obviously from anywhere in particular to the public. A large percentage of Midwesterners and Canadians speak _mostly_ General American, if you allow for the occasional drawl or shifted vowel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English
- nsvd2 8mo agoThis is certainly at least an American accent, and would sound out of place in e.g. the UK.
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- syspec 8mo agoDid you mean it is easier for you to understand Spaniards speaking Spanish than Mexican speakers?