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Comment by dakiol | Hacker News Reader

As a non-English speaker, I find the English spoken by non-native speakers far easier to understand and deal with than the English spoken by Americans/British.

I work with Germans, Italians, Spaniards, French, Dutch and I understand them 99% of the time. We use "normal" words (we are not fancy regarding vocabulary) and pronounce them in a non-native way (the way all Europeans that speak English understand)... But the moment our British colleagues join the conversation, then our understanding decreases to around 70%: either because of the usage of "fancy" words or because of pronunciation.

Besides, since we all make the same mistakes when speaking English, we understand each other without asking "sorry, what do you mean?"

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> Besides, since we all make the same mistakes when speaking English, we understand each other without asking "sorry, what do you mean?"

That’s likely because the languages you speak all share recent ancestry (if they’re not all Romance languages, they’re at least all descended from Proto-Indo-European.)

Meanwhile, I’ve seen e.g. Mexican and Chinese ESL speakers have very bad mutual intelligibility, because they make very different mistakes.

> Meanwhile, I’ve seen e.g. Mexican and Chinese ESL speakers have very bad mutual intelligibility, because they make very different mistakes.

That's true. Assume a monolingual learner. You can predict the kinds of mistakes they will make based on their native language (phonetical, phonological, semantic, etc.). As a person learns more languages, they will likely get better at decoding these things. Particularly cultural based assumptions used in languages.

Funny story, had this happen to me in a hostel in Germany. I had to “translate“ from English with a heavy Italian accent to/from English with a heavy Vietnamese accent between roommates. Basically I just repeated what each said into my California English accent with a few touch ups. Everyone finally understood. :D

Same thing happened to me once with a Welsh couple in Krakow. The husband and I could understand the wife but not each other.

I did the same for my Grandfather, with his Punjabi accent, and a Jamaican cashier.

Immigrants in Japan have the same experience too. We often make the same mistakes and thus have a shared understanding of misunderstandings. I would expect immigrants in other places appphave similar experiences too.

A friend of mine spent a few months in Japan, and he said the strangest part was learning that speaking simple, slower English with a strong Japanese accent was often better for getting around than using his broken Japanese.

That’s not surprising. I myself have a lot of trouble understanding the way some foreigners speak Japanese because of the mangled pronunciations.

Spot on. I've witnessed Chinese and Indians (all with decent English skills) be unable to conduct business meetings due to difficult understanding each other's accents. On that project, I frequently 'translated' from English to English, with little/no change in word choice or sentence structure.

I've had to do the same thing in a work context as well, it was eye opening for me.

One of the fun exchanges I saw transcripts in a linguistics course was between two ESL speakers - one native Spanish, the other native Japanese. Something as simple as not knowing the word “income” and using the Spanish “ingress” which was interpreted by the Japanese speaker as “English” was like the Naked Gun of language comedy for me.

But as an ESL person myself I’ve never thought of English as a language about rules as much as memorizations. It’s the x86 of human languages, for better or worse, and trying to systemize it fully was how I messed up English most as a kid and how my parents tried to teach it to me.

American English speakers can have trouble understanding British English speakers too, fwiw. Mostly due to some dramatically different slang and pronunciation rather than use of more obscure words though.

I worked in California for a while and something that kept throwing people off was that I pronounce my "t"s in the English way rather than drop them to "d"s. So it's buTTer and not 'budder', thirTy not 'thirdy', etc. Once I started dropping them to "d"s too, things improved significantly, and I can see why a lot of British YouTubers and geeks develop this 'trans-Atlantic' affectation.

Another funny one I ran into a few times was how for a time like 8:30, we'd say "half eight" in the UK, but when I would casually say this in the US people would be like "half eight? you mean four?" It had never occurred to me this common British parlance would be unintelligible elsewhere. Of course, there are just as many things the other way around, although watching a lot of US TV will take care of that.

Half eight in Swedish is 7:30 :-)

Same in Russian. I think it expands to "halfway to the eighth hour" and since 12:00-1:00 is the first hour, 7:00-8:00 is the eighth hour.

I think it's the same in German too. Halb sieben is 6:30.

My favorite British-ism is, e.g., Monday week. A great simple way of referring to a week from Monday.

Monday week? We would say "a week Monday". Didn't realise this was a British thing! Though I'm Welsh, so perhaps my variation is a Welsh thing.

I’m from California and I had an Irish colleague there who, despite otherwise being amazingly well integrated, stuck to a hard “t” for certain cases of “th.”

So for instance if I might say “These three things,” he would say “these tree things.”

He was clearly able to make the sounds but in some cases he couldn’t. I never felt comfortable asking about it because I thought it might be a class thing.

The 'th' in Irish is usually dropped to 't' if a consonant is followed or at the the tend of a word. Death become Deat, Teeth become Teet, Thrice becomes Trice, Other stays as Other because a vowel is the next sound.

Half height seems very strange. In British English it’s half past eight normally.

I also had that problem with the "ew" sound. I'm never understood if I ask for a "Mountain Dew" - I have to translate to "Mountain Doo" even when the context of a drink is clear.

The other one is asking for a cheese sandwich - that seems to throw Americans every time.

"Chips" gets them every time.

Oh wow, it actually is 8:30 in English. How interesting!

In dutch, half eight is 7:30 too.

7:40 is weird: "ten over half eight"

Spanish does the same thing with time, so it's not uncommon.

That said, the way the French count numbers is, I think, universally confusing. Knowing the French, this is intentional :P

A little more formal would be "half past eight" which clears up the ambiguity, as does "quarter til eight". Not sure who uses that aside from occasionally in US.

"I've only been taking French for two weeks, and I'm already conversational!"

"Wow, you mean you can have a conversation with a French person?"

"No... but I can talk to anyone else who's taken two weeks of French."

I never thought of it this way. I'm American and I can understand fluent English speaking Europeans way better than I can understand British, unless that British person is from London. 70%? That's optimistic. I don't even think I am understanding words, only the most likely context in the flow of a conversation and the most likely way to react.

Fluent Northern European English (Belgium, Netherlands, Scandinavia, North Germany) almost blends into "normal" English to me. It is kind of shocking.

IME as an American, London British can be quite hard to understand, especially at a high word rate (which was my experience). Yes.. it.. turns.. out.. that.. speaking.. slowly.. does.. make.. it.. easier.. to.. understand.

To my Irish ears, fluent English from Dutch people in particular can often sound slightly American.

In this case I think that you have never spoken with people from London with cockney accent..

It's not "normal" English, it's specifically American English - a lot of Europeans have learned from (or at least been heavily influenced by) American movies etc., so they speak an American style.

Yeah yeah I didn’t think of “familiar dialect“ at the time

which is why the quotes were there to let pedantic people know I’m aware there probably is a better term

I suspect this is true for most non-native speakers of a language. They will find speaking with other non-native speakers because they will use less culturally encoded language, probably speak slower and are accustomed to speaking with others that have non-native pronunciation.

I'm not a native speaker of English, either, though with perfect American fluency. I find myself switching to "international English" in those contexts.

Actually, the word "international" is a good example -- in my regular American accent it would be pronounced like "innernational", whereas I would distinguish the T when conversing with non-native speakers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flapping

TL;DR, it's not actually "innernational", but rather an alveolar flap on the t that you have a hard time distinguishing between depending on where you grew up.

Actually, according to the link you’ve provided, it seems that’s an alveolar “nasal” flap, which sounds different to American ears from the regular alveolar flap. It would sound like “itternational” pronounced by an American if an alveolar flap were to be used.

I grew up in Australia, so would have considered myself a native English speaker. We’re even a British colony!

I moved to Scotland for a year, and London for a few years later. I’d regularly here phrasing I’d never heard before and would need the speaker to clarify or would look up later. In the vast majority of those cases it was most often an old word that appears to have fallen out of fashionable usage. “Ken” being a synonym for “know” in Scotland being the one I remember most given how frequently it was used.

So it’s not just non-native speakers that struggle at times!

Scots is not technically the same as English - they diverged about 900 years ago, and differences like ken are common (compare to French connaître, or German kennen).

Scots is not the same as Scottish English either. Words like "ken" in Scottish English are borrowed from Scots, but while the vast majority in Scotland speak Scottish English, only about 30% of the population can speak Scots.

"Voice recognition lift" (BBC Scotland) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3lYLphzAnw

Robert Burns' songs and poetry are mostly in Scots. It's a hoot to read through, like Chaucer almost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tam_o%27_Shanter_(poem)

Yes, I've heard this before. I've even had to ""translate"" between an Ulsterman and an Afrikaner who both nominally spoke English as a first language but were unable to understand one another's accents a lot of the time. Regional accents and idioms increase confusion, while all International English speakers have a uniform, comprehensible, slightly bland idiom and accent.

It's just what you're used to. Visit Singapore and listen to Singlish. They all understand each other just fine because it's their dialect but if you're not used to it then it takes a while to get used to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAyRoPcuykY

I think this is due to where you are on the path of learning English, and maybe because people feel more comfortable asking to repeat something when you are talking amongst not natives. Also not natives speak slower.

Comes a point where you get so used to what is, admittedly, such a weird and non sensical pronunciation, that the same mistakes I used to make as an Italian native I don't understand at all from a Spanish native that doesn't pronounce as well as I'm used to. Only after I realise what the word is I understand where they are coming from.

Also the every day vocabulary is not that big and fancy, I tend to use some "fancy" words sometimes just because that's the word I would have used in Italian, and it's correct in English, but not widely known. Then again I'm now reading Stephen king and having to use the dictionary every few pages, just because something is mostly obvious by the context but I want to double check.

Plus, native speakers tend to use a lot more idiom. Which generally makes things much harder to understand (but arguably more fun) -- this is even quite noticeable when encountering English from different regions.

The distinctions in meaning, understanding, and nuance between vocabulary, grammar, and idiomatic or cultural grasp of a language are profound.

By analogy: elements, valance bonds, and van der Waals forces in chemistry. All matter, some are stronger, subtle variances can have profound differences.

I’ve experienced the same. I’d say people tend to speak way faster in their native tongue.

Regardless, it is very frustrating to know the meaning and the spelling of an English word but not knowing how to pronounce it. Or the inverse, hearing a word I know but not recognising it until someone spells it for me or I see it written.

I learnt most of my English in written form so this happened to me a lot when I moved to London for a couple of years. I remember pronouncing “recipe” like “ree-syp” and my boss had no clue what I meant.

With Spanish and other languages you can learn the pronunciation rules and you’ll be able to read a text correctly even if you don’t know the words. With English you have basically to learn every word, as double o doesn’t sound the same in “door” as in “soon”. I remember being dumbfounded by the pronunciation of words like “tomb” or “womb” or “colonel”.

The most outrageous for me are still the heteronyms like lead the verb and lead the metal. To add insult to injury the past form of the verb is pronounced the same way as the metal even if they are written differently..

Your colleagues might be amused by Europanto[1], a creole created for amusement by professional translators.

My modest proposal is this: it used to annoy the brits that european english differs[2] to their dialect. On the other side, we should incite the possibility to embrace[3] our dialect for international use. Finally, this would paradoxically be a gift to EN-GB speakers, because EN-US speakers might then experience being separated by a common language.

[1] http://www.europanto.be/cabillot1.html

[2] https://www.eca.europa.eu/Other%20publications/EN_TERMINOLOG...

[3] as in s'pore, lah?

Can second this.

My house has folks from France, Burundi, US and India. The non-US people find it a lot easier to understand each other's accents than Americans do understanding us.

Ironically though, I have a bad habit of using big words in spoken English, because I learnt it as written bookish English first.

FWIW I’m a native English speaker and the same happened to me when I learned Spanish. I suspect that with any language, native speakers have a much wider vocabulary and use more colloquialisms, not to mention speaking much faster and more cultural references etc.

Same for me. I speak "North American" Spanish fluently. I struggle with Cuban, Argentine, and Chilean Spanish. My sweet spot is non-native speakers, as the vocab is usually simplified.

> I struggle with Cuban, Argentine, and Chilean Spanish.

As a Chilean I understand very well what you mean ;)

> As a non-English speaker, I find the English spoken by non-native speakers far easier to understand and deal with than the English spoken by Americans/British.

As you allude to, that's typical for any speakers of any foreign language, in my experience. I speak several languages in addition to English, and native speakers of those languages are often the hardest to understand, because they're the most fluent in the language.

This is really obvious and not that remarkable. Replace English with your own mother tongue, German, I guess? And then ask the same exact question to non-native German speakers. The reason why you can't see that is because you're unaware of proficienty of your own mother tongue. Everyone is.

This is fantastic, as it matches exactly my experience in several years of working for US companies, and dealing with both US/UK native and a lot of foreigners like me (I'm Italian).

The hard part is that most of said US/UK native speakers seem to fail to comprehend this simple wisdom of yours.

I guess that you have never spoken with Scottish, Irish, Indian and Singaporean people...

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