Interesting.

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

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