I worked (in the US), with a French guy, who had lived in the US for many years (as an adult).
He had very little accent. He had obviously worked very hard to remove the accent (big job), but he still understood English as a secondary language, and sometimes had difficulty comprehending dialogue (especially in New York, where we talk quickly).
People didn’t cut him slack for the lack of comprehension, where I think they would have, if he had a stronger accent.
I also knew an Italian, who had a strong accent, but a better command of English than most native speakers. I think he deliberately played his accent up.
Italian here. Great English language skills, lived in SF for ~10 years until 2020.
A great trick is to keep some of your accent, so people would know for sure you're a foreigner, but also surprise them with words that only the most literate people would know.
How to do it? Easier if your native language is Italian and you studied Latin at school. There's hundreds of words like that that naturally come to you as the ones you would use if you had to say the same thing in your native Italian language.
I'd say I have met a lot of native speakers that, while obviously native, have poor vocabulary skills (and also make some grammar mistakes - but not the ones the ESL students usually make)
It's not surprising to have people that have trouble with words like rotund, pulmonary, saturnine, among others. (Or the usual mistakes like "should of", "it's" when they mean "its", etc)
Foreigners in Japan have the same issue. Pretend not to speak a lick of Japanese and you'll get great service. Speak just a little and suddenly they think you can read Archimedes (or the Japanese equivalent).
My wife and I went to Tokyo, and it stayed in a hotel by Disney. We spent like 4-5 days in Tokyo itself, and another 4-5 at the Disney parks.
My experience, everywhere in Tokyo from small restaurants to Disney, was that everyone was nervous to try to speak English with me, but willing to try. Even the waitress at one restaurant that clearly didn't speak much English.
When I tried to speak Japanese, they were delighted. My language partners have highly praised my accent, which I understand to mean that I'm not completely horrible. And I have a decent basic vocabulary and horrible grammar.
I have had some instances (both in Tokyo and with my language partners who were not in Tokyo) where they suddenly started talking way above my level, and I had to ask them to explain things, but I think that's just the weirdness of talking to a full grown adult that speaks like a child, and trying to manage that situation.
The 日本語上手ですね！ (lit. your Japanese is good) phenomenon. You know you’ve made it when your Japanese stops getting complimented. Obligatory Dogen: https://youtu.be/Qmfipv-H4_o
I can just barely hear that there's something wrong with his accent on the first 2 examples... But I'm not good enough to point out what it is. It sounds like he's slurring some of it or something. He definitely speaks more fluidly on the last one, too.
> My language partners have highly praised my accent, which I understand to mean that I'm not completely horrible.
Not trying to be mean at all, but one should be careful with such assumptions, especially in a country like Japan that that abounds with social norms and codes that foreigners are almost guaranteed to get wrong.
You're correct about being careful about assumptions about culture, but I'm not assuming much here. I've been told and read many times that that's what that means.
My experience was the opposite. Pretend to speak no Japanese and you will get baffled looks and maybe asked to leave the store. At best you will be treated a little coldly. Speak a little and they will be most accommodating. They will help you fill in the gaps of your language knowledge and do their best to make your experience in Japan smoother.
Overall, Japanese people really are culturally and linguistically fairly isolated on their little island chain -- and they hate it. One of the upshots of this is that fluent or even conversational English speakers are quite rare in Japan; and another is that anything and anyone from "overseas" is a potential source of fascination and wonder. (A little scary, too.) So when it comes particularly to the young (< 50 y.o. give or take), as a foreign tourist you will find yourself surrounded by people mildly to extremely intrigued in making a cross-cultural connection -- seeking a "borderless feeling" -- but they have no idea how. With a bit of conversational Japanese, you can establish lines of communication with the Japanese you meet and kick off that connection process, for which they will be quite grateful.
At the very least, learn how to ask for an English speaker if one is available. I did this once in a frozen yogurt shop, and was introduced to the manager, a 22-year-old who wanted to tell me all about her time as an exchange student in California (as well as how to buy yogurt in the shop).
Of course, this was Osaka. So maybe they were just super-accommodating to me so they would get my business. (By comparison to Tokyo, Osaka is hustle town -- matters of decorum and cultural appropriateness can be put aside if it means more business.)
Of course, this was Osaka. So maybe they were just super-accommodating to me so they would get my business. (By comparison to Tokyo, Osaka is hustle town -- matters of decorum and cultural appropriateness can be put aside if it means more business.)
LOL this is my experience in Taiwan. I find my Mandarin is miraculously much better at the night markets than it is when asking directions.
Honestly I love being a poor mandarin speaker in Taiwan. I am pretty sure a good chunk of the population has better english than my mando, but if I start with madarin they will respond in kind 90% of the time. My theory is that they're happy for me to struggle with a language than to do the same themselves - fine by me, great opportunity to practice!
> My theory is that they're happy for me to struggle with a language than to do the same themselves
Relatedly, and famously, Shigeru Miyamoto takes interview questions in English and understands it fairly well, but responds via interpreter simply because the idea of people hearing him struggle with English embarrasses him.
I got really frustrated the first time I spent an extended period of time in Germany, and was trying to learn German. Every time I tried to practice the language, native speakers would immediately switch to English.
I assumed this was because my German sucked.
Someone finally explained to me that my beginner German was fine, but most people relished the opportunity to practice their English.
I learned to just keep going in broken German, my conversation partner in broken English. For the most part, it worked.
I had the same experience when I was doing an internship in Germany. One particular coworker kept speaking English to me, despite everyone else speaking German to me. At this point, I had lived there for a year already and spoke German pretty well, so comprehension definitely wasn't an issue.
I think he was either used to speaking English with non-Germans or just liked having the opportunity to speak English.
I just kept replying in German and he eventually switched to speaking German to me.
I'm trying in earnest to learn Spanish, and am at intermediate level. I've had similar experiences trying to use Spanish in various contexts particularly in Southern California where I live, where there are a ton of native Spanish speakers that also speak English, and most of them speak FAR better English than I speak Spanish. Years into my language-learning adventure, I continue to feel super intimidated to try to use my Spanish here, locally, because people so often compliment my accent but the conversation quickly switches to English. I always feel like I'm creating frustration and inconvenience by trying to practice my Spanish, though it could just be my nervousness and desire to people-please that lead me to feel that way.
I've had more of this kind of experience (Me speaking intermediate Spanish, with my conversation partner speaking intermediate English) in places outside of my home area where people are more likely to speak Spanish than English on a regular basis: a range of Latin American countries that I've visited, and especially when I visited the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.
I’ll second the advice of going someplace where nobody speaks English. There is lots of that in south and Central America.
The absolute worst is places where most people speak English well but some don’t at all. Puerto Rico for example. I’d start off in Spanish and get answered back in perfect English a dozen times in a row, then finally give up and just speak English to somebody. Every single time, that would be the person who didn’t understand it. And every time I’d be so flustered at having to switch back on the fly that my own Spanish would disappear.
In rural, undeveloped bits of Central America, though, I’d go weeks at a time without speaking English at all. It certainly boosts your confidence.
As a German it took me quite some practice to get over this nicety and stick to German when talking with a foreigner who's bad at German but knows decent English.
There might be something else at play too - it's probably harder for them to remind themselves to slow down / speak in a sufficiently 'textbook-like' style in their own language than it is for them to switch to English.
> Pretend not to speak a lick of Japanese and you'll get great service.
Same here in Sweden: I look South European, so if I speak Swedish I'm just a 'foreigner', if I speak English I'm a tourist who should be impressed by how welcoming and friendly the locals are.
As a German in Sweden, asking "Do you speak English?" in Swedish works very rarely. Apparently my accent isn't bad enough. I'm now usually asking "Can we speak English with each other?" (in Swedish) which I find a bit more rude, but works a lot better.
I do the same, it works the world over. Especially if you go the extra mile to learn to say "I am learning, but your language is challenging and I know you will have a better command of English" which serves to flatter and gets you great service.
They're also aware how difficult it is to learn so you get the extra props for trying. My wife learned Japanese to full professional proficiency and we basically get the extra acknowledgment all the time.
> I also knew an Italian, who had a strong accent, but a better command of English than most native speakers. I think he deliberately played his accent up.
Italian here with a decent grasp of the English language.
1) some sounds are harder to learn how to pronunciate, especially for American English, and especially 'R' based ones
2) with time I've grown fond of my accent and wear it as a distinctive badge. Most of my English speaking, European colleagues do the same. Everyone has their own and it makes part of our personality.
> 2) with time I've grown fond of my accent and wear it as a distinctive badge. Most of my English speaking, European colleagues do the same. Everyone has their own and it makes part of our personality.
I like that. My acquaintance used to have to peel the girls off him.
I have a very strange accent, that has been stepped on, by many years of traveling.
As a child, I had a British accent, then, I lived in Maryland, and got a slightly "Southern" accent. I have lived in New York for the last thirty years, so that has also affected my accent.
Plus, I have a scratchy, high-pitched voice, anyway (vocal cord damage, as a kid).
I am American and have a slight Southern/rural USA accent (much less slight when visiting family), and the responses I get vary so wildly. Some Irish women I met in a bar absolutely loved it, while in big cities in the USA I am sometimes assumed to be an absolute moron.
I'm a brit, I don't know much about stuff, so, what is implied by 'yankee'? I wasn't aware it was still used - Is it an insult? And something to do with the civil war? Why are you considered a 'damn Yankee' by Marylanders?
I assumed redneck was an insult but it seems not always from what I've heard. I guess it is here. But what does it mean?
These may seem odd questions but I truly don't know. TIA
Between the "North" and the "South" on the Eastern seaboard there is a central area that is in some ways renounced by both "regions". There's some remainder of the Civil War/Mason Dixon line there, but it doesn't follow that delineation today.
For example, in New York someone who grew up in rural Maryland would likely be viewed culturally as a "Southerner". But so would someone from Western Pennsylvania. So would someone from West Virginia, despite West Virginia and Pennsylvania being part of the Union. People in the Deep South would view residents of these areas as "Yankees".
In both cases what is meant is that "Your cultural experience is different enough from ours that you're not 'us', you're 'them'." where 'them' is Southern or Northern, wherever you're not. The thing is, there's a big chunk of the mid-Atlantic seaboard that is unique, not traditionally Southern or Northern.
"Redneck" is usually pejorative for a working class, white, Southerner. When rednecks say "redneck" it usually isn't an insult, but when others use the word it usually is. Calling somewhere a "Redneck bar" is fine, but calling someone in that bar a "redneck" is usually not.
"Yankee" is just a term for Northerner. I'm sure you could say it as an insult, and I'm sure some people think "yankee" is an insult, but if someone calls me a yankee I'd happily agree with them.
>"Redneck" is usually pejorative for a working class, white, Southerner. When rednecks say "redneck" it usually isn't an insult, but when others use the word it usually is. Calling somewhere a "Redneck bar" is fine, but calling someone in that bar a "redneck" is usually not.
Here in NZ, "redneck" seems to be morphing away from the "hick" or working class definitions to more of a "racist bigot" connotation that could be applied more widely.
It’s also used in the north no? New York even has a baseball team featuring it, which may be more or less positive depending on which borough you’re from.
tl;dr- the joke here is that a Southerner would think Maryland is "the North", and a Northerner would think Maryland is "the South".
"Yankee" is/was a derogatory term for Northerners, most typically used by Southerners during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. If you want to get technical, it applies most strongly to New Englanders, but when used by a Southerner, it's a pretty broad brush. Nowadays, you'd be hard pressed to actually find someone using the term "yankee" in any sort of serious or angry way. It's much more common to hear it in a tongue-in-cheek way, which is how the parent commenter was using it.
"Damn Yankee" is something of a stereotypical phrase you might hear from that time period, especially Reconstruction, when there were still a lot of hard feelings about the war, as well as about Northerners who moved south to participate in Reconstruction, often known as "carpetbaggers" and who were thought of as profiteering from the situation.
But nowadays it's more of a cultural joke, or meme. Like for example, if someone were to recommend me a barbecue restaurant in, like, Vermont or something, I might say "I don't know if I trust a damn Yankee to make good barbecue!" (To be fair, I would have very low expectations all the same. Barbecue just isn't the same outside the South.)
As for "redneck": it's still something of a disparaging term, and connotes poverty, poor education, and general backwardness. It's sorta like the word "hillbilly" or "country bumpkin", except with a more distinctly Southern vibe. However, it's been partially reclaimed and is often used by country folks to refer to themselves.
However, it's not exactly a term used only by Northerners- it wouldn't be at all surprising to hear (for instance) a Southern doctor or lawyer grumbling about "a bunch of stupid rednecks" causing trouble.
>Green Eggs and Ham narrated by the Reverand Jesse Jackson
>What was great about this skit was that absolutely nobody in that studio even knew Jesse Jackson was there outside of Kevin Nealon who anchored Weekend Update and Lorne Michaels. It was a great surprise to everyone and completely unscripted. Jesse just absolutely nailed that reading.
Amusingly enough, Schwarzenegger's Austrian accent is the German version of a hillbilly accent or something, so in German dubs of his movies, they use a different voice actor. I'm told Germans think watching his movies in English is weird because his voice is "wrong".
When I lived in Germany, I saw a video clip of Arnold speaking German. To my great surprise, he had the same accent when speaking German that he does when speaking English. He apparently speaks a regional dialect from the part of Austria he comes from, and it really affects how he sounds.
When my family goes traveling I am the designated “learn enough local language to get by“ person.
I know a little bit of Polish but I speak it with a perfect BBC Polish accent. Worked a long time at it. I noticed that on buses or in restaurants if I told people I didn’t understand Polish they completely ignored me and didn’t simplify their language. I think because I can speak my few words like a native they just filtered out what I was saying.
The same was not true in Paris. I am not convinced I have a great French accent, however.
French people can be quite special with the accent and pronunciation, though. For some reason, it's the language where I've had to work the most on the accent and pronunciation to get understood. You can speak weird english and people still understand what you say, but weird french will get you nowhere.
> You can speak weird english and people still understand what you say
Not necessarily. I'm Irish, and English is my first language. Landing in Atlanta airport a few years ago I asked some airport staff for directions to the bus, and they looked at me blankly. It was only when I said "bus" in a fake American accent that they understood
> You can speak weird english and people still understand what you say
I suppose OP meant "weird non-native English".
Native accents, in my experience, are a different matter. Certain non-American accents (Irish, Scottish come to mind) are just very hard to understand for untrained American ears that have never been exposed to them before.
I've never had that problem, though I've only visited Paris for more than a month or so at at time. I found the Parisians play along politely with my no-doubt embarrassing efforts.
I have the same in Berlin. My German is terrible, and I have real problems understanding it. But I have learned to say "Enscheldigung, mein Deutsch ist schlect" (excuse me, my German is terrible) so well that I find a lot of Germans assume I'm being modest and carry on speaking fluent German to me.
Germans understand you to mean that your German is terrible, but since if you wanted them to slow down and speak clearly you would have said so, they think nothing more of it than that your German is terrible and you are surprisingly self aware for an American (or whatever you are).
too true. I'm always caught out by how direct everyone is here :) It's refreshing in a way, though it does come across as incredibly rude too.
I'm always thinking "why do you think I said that to you now?", because if someone said to me "sorry, my English is really bad" I'd respond with something like "Oh OK, I'll slow down then, or is there another language we share?".
I was brought up in England, and there it can be very rude to ask for what you want directly (usually depending on class, as most things do in English culture). So it feels very wrong to just come right out with it ;) but I'm learning.
That's a pure misunderstanding; saying your German is terrible doesn't mean you want to speak English or you want someone to say something in simpler words, it just means your German is terrible.
Actually, it does imply that you want the counterparty to speak more slowly or otherwise accommodate you. Otherwise there's no reason to point it out at all.
Yup. I would indeed take it to mean "apologies that i am butchering this language and/or its grammar". Same thing in The Netherlands: if you're excusing your command of the language, that's polite. If you want to request something, you'd ask. Eg, "nicht zo schnell, bitte".
My wife (Polish) frequently gets the cold treatment in busy places when asking for help but my ridiculously rubbish attempts at polish[1] end up with 5 star service and smiles. Smiles in ex-communist small shops are not a thing afaict, except when a foreigner tries to speak Polish.
Me speaking English gets the cold shoulder too. We’ve tried this out in different situations where we don’t make it known we’re together just so we can compare and contrast the treatment.
[1] trying to buy a medium size bottle of water with “nie duze, nie male woda nie gazowana po prosze”
Poles are just very neurotic about it. I didn’t realize this until I started to learn another language (Russian) so I could put the experience of learning Polish in some kind of context.
Well they had to keep their language alive in secret for a century or so. And AFAIK even teenagers use relatively few slangy terms, the exact opposite of how American youths speak.
That happened to me when I moved to the US from Germany. When my accent was stronger people talked slower which made it easy to understand. Then my accent got better, people started speaking at their normal speed and I didn’t understand them.
Same happened to me in Spanish. I can pronounce Spanish pretty well so when I was a beginner and said something to somebody in Costa Rica they responded with full speed Spanish. So I had to learn to mispronounce more.
Linus Torvalds is like this now. He's a far cry from the famous recording of him saying "Hello, my name is Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux as Linux." His American accent is quite good. There are tells here and there, but as a European programmer he has had some baseline English proficiency which he honed, along with his accent, from his many years living in the USA.
He had very little accent. He had obviously worked very hard to remove the accent (big job), but he still understood English as a secondary language, and sometimes had difficulty comprehending dialogue (especially in New York, where we talk quickly).
People didn’t cut him slack for the lack of comprehension, where I think they would have, if he had a stronger accent.
I also knew an Italian, who had a strong accent, but a better command of English than most native speakers. I think he deliberately played his accent up.