Speaking of becoming less Chinese

Post #23,311 by marlowe 1/6/02 5:33:18 PM Reply	Speaking of becoming less Chinese I run into a lot of immigrants from China (and sometimes Taiwan) in the embedded development business. They're quite agreeable people, and easy to work with. They're generally practical, detail-oriented and logical, and express themselves well. Not like the ones from India who mostly seem to have an overcompensated inferiority complex. Supposedly English is used by much of the media in India. So how is it that people from China seem to speak better English than those from southern India? I can't help but suspect it has something to do with the amount of effort being made. Now I may have a biased sample. After all, the really xenophobic ones wouldn't immigrate, would they? But that doesn't account for the marked difference between Han and Hindu. My theory about the Chinese is that the vast majority are very agreeable, and tend to avoid conflict. So much so that it becomes a fault. And so it is that they wind up being ruled by paranoid thugs. They get the rulers they're willing to put with. "They're running us over with tanks!" "Hush, don't make a fuss." It's a fine line between being civilized and being tamed. [link\|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/index.html\|http://www.angelfir...e/index.html] Sometimes "tolerance" is just a word for not dealing with things.
Post #23,331 by nking 1/6/02 10:47:24 PM Reply	Chinese and Indians Well the India people generally learn a British version of English and speak with a thick accent. I am not sure why, but they are sometimes hard to understand. My grandmother had an Indian Heart Doctor speak to her about a "Heart Murmur" and he ended up saying something like "Hot Momma" and she wasn't sure what he was talking about. Some people from India that I know that speak better English call these type of people "Hadji" after the Indian boy in Johnny Quest of the same name who spoke broken-English. But anyway I have worked with Chinese people and they adapted to English a lot better. They are easier to get along with and can be quite helpful. One, named Bert, had helped me learn Active Server Pages, actually we helped each other out a lot. He evetually left the lawfirm and got a job as a contractor for a higher salary. I should have followed suit and left the company back then, but silly me, I stayed on. he had three masters degrees from China and one from the USA colleges. This was his first programming job, before that he was a civil engineer. Something about the lawfirm made him quit, I never asked him what, but he felt he had to work somewhere else. I still keep in contact with him. "In order to completely solve a problem, you must make sure that the root of the problem is completely removed! If you leave the root, the problem will come back later to get you." - Norman King
Post #23,333 by Meerkat 1/6/02 10:57:48 PM Reply	Now's the time to give him a call. Even if he can't directly offer you a job, he may know someone that can. Job hunting seems to be very much biased towards who you know, rather than what you know. Like a lot of things. On and on and on and on, and on and on and on goes John.
Post #23,339 by wharris2 1/7/02 1:49:46 AM Reply	Interesting. I've worked with India Indians and those I've come in contact with have also had very thick, near-unintelligable accents. I hate to stereotype, but out of the dozen or so I've spoken with, I've rarely been able to understand more than half the words spoken. I don't have enough contact with other foreigners to make a decent comparison. The two foreign exchange students I knew in high school spoke with English accents, but they enunciated very well and were quite understandable. The Indonesian I know started out with a really wretched accent but it improved quite rapidly over the time I knew him. When I last saw him, you could still hear an accent but he was as understandable - heck, even more so - than someone from the Deep South. :=) Bottom line: I don't know what the hell it is that makes some people adopt and speak foreign languages more readily than others. I would probably get a polite reception (but hidden smiles) if I went to Germany and tried to deliver my mangled German - but then I've never lived or tried to do business in Germany. Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch, entschuldigen Sie mich!
Post #23,344 by pwhysall 1/7/02 2:54:09 AM 1/7/02 2:57:10 AM Reply	Re: Interesting. You may hate to stereotype, but yer gonna go ahead and do it anyway? :) Well, I grew up in and around Leicester, which, at some point in the next 25 years, will make the transition from majority white to majority asian. Asian accents are just normal to me. Since about 1970, it's had the highest proportion of asians to whites in the UK. I have no problem with asian accents - although understanding the strangled tones of the bloke on the RealPlayer ("Wellcyum two ReawlPlayerrrrr") intro clip is something of a challenge to me. And I guarantee that there are colleagues of mine you'd find completely unintelligible - they're Geordies. And let's face it - those injuns spoke better English than your Gujerati, or Urdu, or Hindi, or Punjabi... Peter Shill For Hire [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] Edited by pwhysall Jan. 7, 2002, 02:57:10 AM EST Expand All History
Post #23,415 by ben_tilly 1/7/02 5:28:21 PM Reply	Have you wondered whether the fault is with you? I have worked with 4 Indians from India in the last few years. Not one was hard for me to understand. Add in various friends, relatives of friends, aquaintances, people in stores, etc. We are up to quite a few people. And with no problems that I have seen. Now some of their accents were quite noticable, true, but perfectly comprehensible. Based on simple statistics, I have to wonder whether the problem was that they were hard to understand, or that you are bad at understanding them. Cheers, Ben
Post #23,426 by wharris2 1/7/02 6:14:30 PM Reply	Could very well be. Based on simple statistics, I have to wonder whether the problem was that they were hard to understand, or that you are bad at understanding them. Not to mention that it does take practice, of which I've had little. There are coworkers I have who work with India contractors on a daily basis and who don't seem to have my difficulty; then there are people like me who may speak with them on job-related issues maybe once every week or two and who are as hard-pressed as I am to grasp what they're saying. (Case in point: conference call this morning, the project leader of a project I'm involved with was darn near interpreting for the other three of us in the room as the call progressed.) I freely admit that it could be that in some way my brain is just wired such that it's harder for me to make the cross-connections than it is for other people. Or maybe I have some subconscious resistance for making the effort. For something like this, early exposure to foreign languages may help. Nowdays I half-wish my parents had insisted I'd taken French in the grade school I went to. I had German in high school and can usually puzzle out the meaning of a German web site or news group, but that's not quite the same as intensive exposure at an earlier age. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Post #23,538 by ben_tilly 1/8/02 4:45:47 PM Reply	Being Canadian may help Canadians tend to understand and be understandable to people with many different backgrounds. As a result many Canadians have stories of serving as an impromptu interpreter between for instance, Southerners and Australians. I was raised in Canada... Cheers, Ben
Post #23,548 by CRConrad 1/8/02 5:23:13 PM Reply	Or if you'd seen more artsy furrin sub-titled films, even...
Post #23,585 by wharris2 1/8/02 8:18:37 PM Reply	Those artsy fartsy things? Ewwwwwww :=) Maybe if France turned out more Jackie-Chan like movies. Or if there were more Terminator films in Sweden. :=) "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Post #23,332 by Andrew Grygus 1/6/02 10:57:02 PM Reply	Interesting - and totally Politically Incorrect . . A couple decades ago, when so many young Americans of European extraction were "wanabe Indians", some interesting observations were made. Now, these young people wanted to be as Indian as you could get - certainly more Indian than most current pickup driving real Indians. "Medicine men", both real and ersatz, were happy to oblige with instruction on all things traditional (often fabricated as they went along). Many well meaning young ladies tried strapping their babies into cradle boards. European kids would kick and scream and spit and struggle until let out - it just couldn't be done, no matter how much the parents wanted it. Both Indian and Oriental kids, on the other hand, accepted the cradle board without protest. we're talking Amerinds, here (should be spelled Indios, but isn't), not Indians from India (who's gurus (real, ersatz and home grown versions) have had a larger following among Americans for well over a century). [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #23,354 by boxley 1/7/02 9:18:31 AM Reply	that does not have to do with race Most whites put babies to bed in their own room with a crib from the day they come home from the hospital.. I hear it all the time, "he cries so hard but he has to learn". Natives keep the child in the same bed with them until 3-4 when the kid wants to shift his ass out for his own reasons. Now a kid that is used to being next to Mom has bonded so a cradle board is fine. A white kid who only gets picked up and cuddled as an occational favor wouldnt like to be strapped down. thanx, bill My Dreams aren't as empty as my conscience seems to be
Post #23,369 by admin 1/7/02 10:00:09 AM Reply	Yep. There's a large cultural bias against having your child sleep with you. Additionally, a breast-fed infant is a lot more convenient to feed in the middle of the night if he's already right there -- not so with bottle-fed. Since many people in America still bottle-feed their children, they have no advantage in keeping the child in bed with them. Ours slept with us for about 6 months, at which point he needed to sleep by himself. Regards, -scott anderson
Post #23,375 by Andrew Grygus 1/7/02 11:15:05 AM Reply	Not so quick . . These babies were born in the wanabe community and were treated same as Indian babies from day one (to the extent they would tolerate it). Remember, these young people were trying to be Indians and paid close attention to the details. I used to visit some local communities of wanabes back then to listen to their "medicine men", so I know what they were up to. Yes, it is totally politically incorrect to imply in any way there are any inborn differences whatever from one race to another or between male and female, but that does not negate the liklihood there are such differences. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #23,376 by boxley 1/7/02 11:22:24 AM Reply	Remonds me of a paragraph from little big man About the white kid being facinated by a ticking watch and the careless attitude of the indian kid. Different races do have inherent differences at birth, not so much difference that they are outside the norm, but differences exist. Genders are different from birth as well. thanx, bill My Dreams aren't as empty as my conscience seems to be
Post #23,381 by CRConrad 1/7/02 12:49:07 PM Reply	Whites, Injuns, and Watches - that reminds me... Stop me if you've heard this one before: This prosperous paleface shows off his watch to a redskin: "See, these dials tell me what time of day it is, even if I can't see the sun!". The native is highly impressed, mumbling something about "heap big medicine". Some time later, the Indian comes upon the white guy again, but this time, the Mechanical Marvel isn't working. Whitey tries winding it up, fiddling with the adjustments, tapping gently on the back of it, etc, etc... All to no avail. Finally he opens up the watch and shakes it -- and out falls a dead fly that somehow got in there and gummed up the works! To which the Noble Savage observes: "Aha, that why no work -- engineer dead!". Christian R. Conrad The Man Who Knows Fucking Everything
Post #23,352 by CRConrad 1/7/02 8:39:47 AM Reply	That's not so much "better" English the Han are speaking... ...as FOREIGN (American) English. The Hindus, on the other hand, are speaking perfectly correct English -- only, it's their NATIVE English, not American (Foreign) English. That is, the Chinese you get to hear speaking English are the tiny minority who have learnt a foreign language well enough (and got enough of an education in general) to dare emigrate somewhere where it's the first or only language. Most -- an overwhelming majority -- of their countrymen, though, don't speak it at all, or with such atrocious accents that you'd probably scream your lungs out for a good Raj-English-speaking Hindu (or Sikh) if you had to try and make sense of what they're saying. In India, you have the opposite situation: It's precisely because English is big enough to be a living useful language there that it's adapting to Indian accents; that this is becoming its own form of the language, no less "correct" (in its own environment) than Strine in 'Strailia or "Yah Mon" in Jameehka (while China doesn't have a native English except possibly in HK -- Doug?). The Indians who emigrate are polyglot; they just take one of their several languages with them where they go -- and are probably no less shocked at what you have done to the language of the King James Bible than you at what they have. Sheesh, guys... How the fuck is it that none of you could see what's so obvious? Weren't you all being Birdy(-brain)-num(bskull)-num(bskull)s there? Christian R. Conrad The Man Who Knows Fucking Everything
Post #23,401 by marlowe 1/7/02 3:52:52 PM Reply	Perfectly correct Hindu English? It depends on what the definition of "English" is. I suppose of Ebonics counts as a legitimate dialect, then so should this. But there are two aprts to the problem: the spoken accent, and the ideosyncracies of style. Everything they say comes out sounding more or less like "blooble ooble ooble ooble" so you figure if they just put it in writing there'll be no problem. It's at that point that you realize it's possible to write with an accent. No, they don't spell funny or use really bad grammar. But they do use bad style. I can tell the difference between something written by a Chinese and something written by a south Indian without looking at the name. The Chinese writes in crisp clear sentences that get to the point. A little ungrammatical perhaps, but never fatally so. The Hindu style is obscurantist by comparison. Perhaps even in actuality. He doesn't so much tell you something as allude to it. Or maybe it's partly me. But it's not through want of trying. Remember, I'm the guy who got halfway through the Bhagavad Gita (in an English translation) before giving up in exasperation. And I still get headaches from trying to read most of Ashton's posts. [link\|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/index.html\|http://www.angelfir...e/index.html] Sometimes "tolerance" is just a word for not dealing with things.
Post #23,406 by a6l6e6x 1/7/02 4:50:26 PM Reply	Do you mean Hinglish? Not to mention Bonglish and Tamlish. [link\|http://www.india-seminar.com/2001/501/501%20sagarika%20ghose.htm\|[link\|http://www.india-seminar.com/2001/501/501%20sagarika%20ghose.htm\|http://www.india-se...%20ghose.htm]] It\ufffds been argued that the invention of Hinglish et al is part of the post-colonial trajectory and a legitimate urge to convert the language of the colonial master into an authentic subcontinental tongue as valid as the American and Australian versions. But the counter-argument is that although the \ufffdchutney\ufffd languages fulfil an important role, they are as yet not developed enough to become an entire lexicon unto themselves. Your problem is that your Indian co-workers don't know the difference between Higlish and English. Alex Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. -- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Post #23,408 by CRConrad 1/7/02 4:57:00 PM Reply	Still symptoms of the same phenomenon, I'd guess. If the south Indian's English is native, or one of several "native" languages for him, you could get "bleed-over" from his other languages (that's how bilinguality works; trust me, I live among a language majority of Finnish-speakers and get to see how that's affected the Finland-Swede minority's Swedish). Maybe in Hindi or whatever, the style you call "bad" in English is all the rage? I dunno. Whereas the Chinese, in my hypothesis, naturally writes "crisp clear sentences that get to the point" -- that's what you do in an essentially alien language; you write as if everything were a school essay, because to you, it pretty much is. And I wouldn't put Raj English on a level with "Ebonics" -- there probably is a "Raj English Ebonics", the speakers of which are looked down upon and seen as bumpkins by genteel speakers of "High Raj English", and you've met only the former (because the latter are well-enough off home in India not to have to emigrate to the States)... Oh sure, this is all pretty much conjecture, but it seems to stand to reason. (Or, to say the same thing in less scientificative terms, it "feels intuitively right".) P.S: Never even tried the Bhagavad Gita, but I do feel rather OK with Ashton... :-) Christian R. Conrad The Man Who Knows Fucking Everything
Post #23,410 by Arkadiy 1/7/02 5:12:56 PM Reply	Effort to learn a language. I think it's an advantage that non-native speakers have (myself included :) ). In order to be understood, we have to apply an effort and learn the language. We expect that effort to be needed. In the case of Indians, English is almost (or even fully) native tongue to them. They do not expect or plan on spend any effort learning English. So, when people around them don't understand what they are saying, their answer is, basically, "Tough, I speak English just like you do."
Post #23,412 by CRConrad 1/7/02 5:22:45 PM 1/8/02 5:23:56 PM Reply	To say it in Oxlish, "Ed Zachary"! :-) Edited by CRConrad Jan. 8, 2002, 05:23:56 PM EST Expand All History
Post #23,413 by CRConrad 1/7/02 5:23:00 PM 1/8/02 5:25:30 PM Reply	One was enuf (WTF happened?); someone admidelete this please Edited by CRConrad Jan. 8, 2002, 05:25:30 PM EST Expand All History
Post #23,425 by marlowe 1/7/02 6:10:17 PM Reply	I think it's partially the natural Chinese manner For all his idiosyncracies, I find Sun Tzu vastly easier to follow than the Bhagavad Gita. Even if I don't get an allusion, I can figure it out from the context. And it makes sense, too. Even Lao Tzu makes some sense to me. By contrast, with the Bhagavad Gita, I feel like I'm being subjected to a snow job to rival any blizzard in Buffalo. The more I try to understand, the greater my suspicion grows that I'm being Sokal-ized. [link\|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/index.html\|http://www.angelfir...e/index.html] Sometimes "tolerance" is just a word for not dealing with things.
Post #23,432 by Ashton 1/7/02 7:05:01 PM Reply	There's another aspect to that one, I think. Sun Tzu's topic is about human psych - so naturally it (can be) translates well-enough. The BG is about It All and.. without Anyone's silly \ufffd. But it presupposes a quite different mindset than 'ours' in the West - it is not 'theology' nor about 'Gods' - except quite peripherally, and always acknowledging such as mere symbols and not 'Beings'. Sanskrit itself was developed for the express purpose of aiding in dealing with matters which Couldn't possibly have er 'local referents' - as all other languages rely upon. If you try to read the BG, with no interest in, exposure to.. some rather lengthy (actual) discussion of the meanings* of a number of Sanskrit words - as you see populating the work - you might well come away with the Zippo you suggest. * meaning is ever a tall order - whole libraries on the idea. Another word like reality ? But I 'mean' - trying to get past the most often entirely too literal and serial models of It All, as is the Western practice in its 'theology' - that is the base condition. In brief - I don't believe that the BG Can be 'read' as one might read Chaucer or Beowulf (with a dictionary) and finally.. sorta see the outlines of an allegory amidst the similes. It presupposes some familiarity with Eastern attitudes and allegories for Existence. It is a Cosmology. I pretend no scholarship in Sanskrit, But I have puzzled over and discussed the many (main) concepts, and over years. During that time my 'ideas' of the words has changed as.. I have changed / we all change. 'Interest' in the ideas precedes doing this much work! IMhO - I don't believe that can be 'created along the way'. 'Explaining' further isn't much of an option, for similar reasons to why proselytizing also ever fails - no one can tell someone else what, their Questions are? (and especially! what their Questions Ought to Be\ufffd!) Hey.. it's something akin to grokking to Fullness ya know? But I can admire your spirit in trying.. :-\ufffd Ashton
Post #23,439 by marlowe 1/7/02 8:09:23 PM Reply	Yeah, like I said. It's a big snow job. [link\|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/index.html\|http://www.angelfir...e/index.html] Sometimes "tolerance" is just a word for not dealing with things.
Post #23,355 by boxley 1/7/02 9:22:01 AM Reply	I have no trouble with Indian Accents or chinese. You guys remind me of an American Tourist on a bus in Montreal hollering about all the disrepectful Canadians who were speaking french instead of english around him. To understand someones accent requires the ability to listen, carefully. Most folks think that if it doesnt sound like they talk listen less not more. and complain about it. thanx, bill My Dreams aren't as empty as my conscience seems to be
Post #23,391 by inthane-chan 1/7/02 3:15:11 PM Reply	On accents... I have no problem with them, since I know my own english is kind of strange... I had two Japanese friends that I used as a perfect comparison. One of them had PERFECT grammer and pronunciation, but you could tell she wasn't a native speaker in about a minute of talking to her. The other had a horrendous accent, and her grammar wasn't all that hot, but you'd forget after about thirty seconds - because she had mastered the slang, and sounded like somebody born here, instead of there. Go figure. :) "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

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