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Comment by pja | Hacker News Reader

It’s probably not obvious to the English guy that what is being spoken is not UK (or US) English, but is instead a "Global English" that is (mostly) a subset of the language they already speak.

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.

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I don't think it's the constructs & vocabulary which causes the most problems.

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)

> It's mostly the dialect (pronunciation), fast speaking and unclearly articulated or swallowed sounds.

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.

For fast speaking some Northern Ireland Accents can get hard to understand even for native speakers.

Try Glaswegian. I'm from the south of England and on occasion hitch-hiked in Scotland. Got a lift from Aberdeen where they speak perfectly understandable English to Glasgow with a Glaswegian building contractor. I don't think I understood more than half of what he said along the way.

> Try Glaswegian.

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.

True, dialects differ. My father was a cockney in London and my mother was Irish, we lived in Wales during WW2 and my father was a Major on the Burma Road - came back with a love for curry that the cook soon adopted. We often had Canadian and Australian officers stay with us. The net result is I am fluent in all British dialects, and adapted to the Canadian dialect in school - kids who spoke funny soon learned Canadian-speak. Once, on the phone, my mother asked me a question, and back I went to Oxford English to answer that question - when I returned to my call, the called asked me who was that? I had switched back to UK-speak and back to Canadian-speak instantly. I also learned Yiddish - my father was a stained glass artist, and while he was in Burma the home office asked him if we could accommodate a family from Poland who had given my father as a reference. It was Mr Berger, my father's art glass supplier in Poland who had escaped via Spain as a DP family. Father and mother, 2 children and their grandmother - we had the space and my father agreed by telegram. My mother and me at 4 were immersed in a Yiddish family. It was great, I soaked up the language like a sponge. In 1946 my father returned and the Bergers went to live in a house they rented. In 1948, we came to Canada. Many of the storekeepers in Toronto were amazed at my Yiddish fluency, as we often shopped in Yiddish store - no supermarkets then, we shopped 2-3 times/week. Butchers, fishmongers, bakers, grocers, greengrocers all a melange of differences - I still long for these aspects as I wander Costco these days.

I've heard one Australian speak only the initial consonant of every syllable.

> (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

I don't have any linguistic insight, I can only speak comparatively regarding my experience with learning German where it's essentially the same story - strong dialects, mumbling and eating sounds make it very difficult (perhaps even more difficult than in English) to understand what the native person is saying.

Admittedly, English and German are linguistically similar, so the same effect might be present here as well.

In the UK in the 80s and 90s it was unfashionable to teach formal English grammar in schools. A whole generation grew up without knowing their gerund from their past participle. (Even as I write this, I know that if put on the spot to explain those words, I’d need to check on Wikipedia). As a native (post-?)modern British English speaker I have observed that “Global English” is a truer version of the language I speak. It intimidates me a bit.

I had to look up gerund, which very much proves you correct.

Isn't that rather normal that foreigners have to learn grammar more explicitly? Outside of teachers and people who studied Polish, nobody remembers what "przysłówek" is.

Good question - I'd assumed that most countries' educational systems teach the formal grammar of their native language(s)?

The challenge is that the formal understanding of a language constantly evolves and there isn’t always even a consensus in the field itself, so perhaps UK school system has/had a point here.

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).

The same could be said about most of what is taught in secondary education. At least an understanding of principles of grammar would help when learning foreign languages. It is also a transferable skill; a number of parallels to coding for example.

I disagree that it’d help much, maybe even the opposite. Knowing how to use the language effectively is different from knowing [some mainstream theory of] how it works and various taxonomies of its parts.

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.

At least in Poland they do at the elementary school level - but, at the high school, Polish lessons focus 95% on the literature.

Is this not understanding things like gerunds why we now have things like "ad spend", when "ad spending" is the pre-existing way of nounifying the verb?

I once had a native German speaker tell me they had trouble understanding me because I was speaking a 'dialect of English'.

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.

Whatever language is spoken, it’s always a dialect of some parent language. Even preferential versions of the language, like “the Kings English”, a.k.a., Received Pronunciation, is still just another dialect that happens to be preferred.

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.

As an English guy who travels I find myself modifying the complexity of my language depending on the audience. "Where station?" if the locals aren't very up on English and so on. It's quite easy to gauge it a bit wrong though. I also sometimes find myself modifying the accent a bit to more like US/Australian style which is often better understood than my natural accent (UK home counties).

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