It’s very easy for a native English speaker to unknowingly step outside the boundary of what constitutes “Global English” and use constructs & vocabulary that are not taught to Global English speakers.
It's mostly the dialect (pronunciation), fast speaking and unclearly articulated or swallowed sounds.
(nothing specific about English here, most of us speak like that in our native languages)
I think it actually is something specific about English. English is stress-timed, which means that sounds are given variable amounts of time, and what gets a regular timing and rythm is stress phrases. Many other languages are syllable timed, which means that the syllables each get roughly the same amount of time. This is probably what creates the impression of the english mumbling, speaking fast, or "eating" sounds.
Edit: agree on the rest, it's probably not the vocabulary or the grammar
Admittedly, English and German are linguistically similar, so the same effect might be present here as well.
I agree. I was once in a car with a Brit and Canadian and had a lot of trouble to understand them as a non-native English speaker. They could understand each other perfectly well. So, it must be not the specifics of the British or Canadian accent, but more about the fast speaking like you say.
I'll put the Western Pennsylvania/Appalachia accent up against Glaswegian.
The Pittsburgh Penguins faced with Pittsburgh-ese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j07W9kCK6Q4
These are comedians making fun of the accent, but they don't do it justice. The accent itself can be near unintelligible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrJnIxrtB4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_u122kFO2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJfNI9DppP4
We once had an employee from Westinghouse from the Netherlands over at our house for Thanksgiving. The poor man could understand everybody in the family except for my grandfather. He finally asked us what he was doing wrong. We all laughed and simply pointed out that the problem was my grandfather's accent, not his English and that a significant portion of America wouldn't be able to understand my grandfather, either.
Unless I’m going into linguistics or some adjacent field, doubtful I’ll need it—and if I do, I might be better off learning it later when I can appreciate the nuance (rather than as a small child, liable to treat as ground truth the whatever formal model that happened to be popular at the time) and from a linguist (rather than elementary school teacher).
Similar deal with music: you don’t need to know theory or notation to play well, and knowing theory doesn’t really mean you can play.
Some say, similar deal with math: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....
IMO the existing ways education works in most countries is a can of worms in general.
It would be very useful to know how English is taught as a foreign language. I assume there are certain methods of constructing phrases that are more natural for certain languages.
You could just as easily have asked him what dialect of German that he spoke.
This happens in languages that do have an official version, too — like French. There’s an official dialect that is defined by L’Academie Française, and there’s everything else. But they’re all still dialects.
The problem is that most people are not exposed to real-life English. It's either quite artificial language during classes or well spoken lines in movies. Words are spoken slower and clearer. Native speakers speak fast, use linking, colloquial language, multitude of idioms, phrasal verbs, and tons of stuff never ever touched during classes.
This is true of most languages. My favourite example in Mandarin Chinese that appears very often in TV shows and films, "what are you looking at?" 看什么看?
On the surface, this should be pronounced as "kan shenme kan", Chinese people like to add particles to things, in this case it gains a "-na", and the whole thing when said quickly actually reduces to something approximating "ka'me ka-a". When you've heard it a few times, you just recognise it, but unless you have a native to explain it (or good subtitles), it's impossible to guess.
I should add that this example is particular to the North, especially Beijing, but other areas have similar but different effects.
I get what you mean, but want to point out that this Global English which allows the folks to communicate is real-life English as it gets. It's just not Her Majesty's or Mr. President's.
Yes, I lived in Brussels, Belgium for almost eight years. I heard plenty of Belgians who spoke English better than many native US speakers, but I also heard plenty of people speaking what I would consider a very broken English, more like what is being discussed here.
"Bonjour. Parlez-vous anglais?"
"Yes, a little bit."
"Hello. I need a passport photo. The photo is for a USA passport. The USA passport photo is a different size from the European size. The size for the USA passport photo is 2 inches by 2 inches."
I live in a Francophone region and speak like this to the locals all the time. Taking short pauses between sentences also helps.
Depending upon the local culture, it may be acceptable to "gently" mix languages. Example: Maybe you can say part of what you need in French, and part in English. When I say something in English, then try to repeat another language (or vice versa), the non-native listener is much more likely to understand me.
Arrogance sucks, just trying to be humble is not enough for me to shake it.
My take on this is to speak regular English with a slight foreign accent, which sounds ridiculous, but it actually does seem to be effective.
Incidentally, I am from the North of England but have lived in the South for the past ten years and people sometimes struggle to understand what I am saying. Repeating myself has become the norm.
Then other students came from other countries and then I figured I just didn’t understand that particular accent.
She pronounced where as “wa” or something like that I was really confused.
Indeed, Northern English is just regular English with random vowels and syllables missed out.
It does sound ridiculous, but I do exactly this when speaking to groups of foreign colleagues. I'll slow down a bit, change my consonants and vowels ever so slightly, and use slightly "incorrect" or simplified grammar. And I think it's helped me. At least, it hasn't hindered me.
It's mostly my accent (or lack of accent, if you wish to think of it that way), but I'm also used to speaking to non-natives, so avoiding idioms and slang.
In the last 2 years, I've sometimes told other natives in Zoom calls to slow down, speak more clearly etc — if I have trouble understanding, non-natives probably have more trouble, but can be more reluctant to admit it.
England is a country of a new accent every 40 miles or so. We understand each other nonetheless; we’re habituated to it from birth. We rarely realise others don’t experience the same.
If not less. There's been a fairly large of degree of flattening over recent years, but my grandparents could quite often differentiate between the accents of people who grew up barely more than a couple of miles apart.
One thing that seems to trip up even some native speakers is that the T-V distinction[1] still exists in the Yorkshire dialect in some contexts. I seem to recall a band getting some criticism for lyric that went "I tell thee", which a few people saying it sound sounded phoney or nothing like what a young person would say, and that it was only used to make the rhyme work. It sounded perfectly natural to my Yorkshire ear - it would just a normal dialect use of "thee".
Nowadays, a few decades later, I find it easier to fall into my English accent instead of trying to pronounce everything clearly. My wife says it sounds chopped up.
Winston ChurchillLike pants. In the US, pants are something you wear on the outside over your underwear. In the UK, pants are what you wear under your trousers.
But the hysterical thing to me, is that the act of “pantsing someone” means exactly the same thing in both languages, despite the different meanings of the word themselves. Either you are pulling down someone’s pants to expose their underwear, or you are pulling down someone’s trousers to expose their pants.
The French would call these words “faux amis”, or “false friends”. You think you know what you mean when you say the word legume, but you don’t understand that they have a different definition of that word.
In the UK, you do NOT want to be caught selling or giving away Fanny Packs. The word Fanny in the UK is a reference to female genitalia, and not your butt. In the UK, if you want to sell or give away these things, you do so with “Bum Bags”. But the word “bum” in the US has a rather different connotation.
Oh, so many hilarious things can be found in this line of books.
What's weird about English is the hugely wide range of "native" English dialects. My late father asked me where my in-laws were from. Then he asked me whether I was sure, because he'd heard they speak English in Scotland.
The plus side is that everyone accepts that everyone else speaks good enough English to carry a conversation. In a lot of other places, once you miss a vowel they will switch to... English.
Similarly I find myself speaking better English when "guided" by an American or English person. It's weird... If someone else speaks broken English, I will too.
They told me it was actually an advantage that I didn’t speak Dutch, because this would encourage all of them to speak English around me. A few weeks later I was asked by the same manager to stop attending the standup meetings, because it was too hard for too many people to speak English instead of Dutch.
That’s only one of my Snow and ASML stories.
Ask English speakers about what's difficult about it, and half of the time they start talking about spelling, because that's what they feel difficult. Nobody says "When I see 'place' or 'book' how do I know if it's a noun or a verb?" because that's just blindingly obvious to a native speaker.
In my first job in China, I was working on a project with Chinese colleagues and an Indian software company.
They teams had difficulty understanding one other. During conference calls, I often had to relay messages. Everyone could understand my English, and I could understand theirs, but the Chinese folks couldn't understand the Indians' accents, and vice versa.
Or do you “do the Necessary”?
What I see more often is Russians and Chinese don't even try and stuck with their broken English after decades of living in USA or UK.
Communication is about exchanging information. If you're this English guy and you're blabbing something and no one understands you, would you be fine with being not understood (i.e. your information being lost)? If so, why even open your mouth?
GP's scenario is about people in Continental Europe. If the English knowledge is weak, an English person speaking in idioms (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awUqKKEKQh4 ) would confuse them quite easily.
I wish the people who do have to work with you as little hardship as they need to suffer...