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Comment by dfawcus | Hacker News Reader

What is the problem? Listening to the piece, the accent itself is quite understandable. Just sounds like they're from the West Country.
The only awkward one was where the bloke was talking about fishing in the bright light, I had to watch the 4 or 5 times before I got the hang of it.
Maybe being English helps?

For non Brits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Country

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Start at 1:40 to 1:50... https://youtu.be/x7MvtQp2-UA?si=YgyWjA01BdExfolp&t=100

Thick accent, poor cell phone connection. Much easier to understand when you're face to face (or video) and have context. It was probably 50% shock - she was expecting a "normal" east NC accent.

FWIW, I bet being English does help - I'm Scottish and don't struggle with accents anywhere near as much as some of my friends. I once had a roommate ask to turn on captions for Trainspotting - and those accents weren't even that thick (IMO)!

Yeah - no problem with that section, nor with the rest of the video.

As to Trainspotting, I found the subtitles a daft idea. Totally unnecessary, but then I'm from NE England.

Added: Apparently some folks had difficulty comprehending "Derry Girls".

Oh, college roommate (while I'm Scottish, I've been stateside since I was 5) went to Scotland with me once. He missed about 1/4 of anything my uncle said. My uncle has a pretty typical working class highland accent (a bit more brogue than a professional from Edinburgh might have, but a far cry from Glaswegian - my family is from Perthshire).

My wife (from Oregon but went to high school in Iowa) stayed in a hostel while living in Germany, and her roommates were British, Irish, and Scottish. They were initially relieved that they all spoke English, but soon realized they could barely understand what the Scottish guy was saying.

One of my coworkers is Greek and learned English in Scotland. Nobody can understand him for the first six months they are working with him. He’s a cool dude though, once you get past the Greek-Scottish accent.

For Brits, I hear that The Wire is comparably difficult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxBGzUhT-TM

Lots of The Wire is a little tricky for Americans.

Especially ironic since both Dominic West (McNulty) and Idris Elba (Stringer Bell) are English. Sheffield and Hackney, respectively.

Dominic West, Wire on: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4ANAtaQsBL4&t=43s

Wire off: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FdbWsX6h4eo&t=3s

Yeah, but those are probably two of the easiest to understand characters in that show

Based on my 7 years in Baltimore I have to say West was pretty spot on. An old 70s vice cop I knew sounded just like that.

Here's a good one from a more recent role West has in a northern-england-based sitcom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhdQ7TbXtuE

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iJ487vFzgBI

"Aaron earned an iron urn"

That scene wasn't too bad as a Brit. I find that I struggle with Boomhauer from King of the Hill (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-_PG-rYyHk) although that's partly because of how much slur there is.

> As to Trainspotting, I found the subtitles a daft idea. Totally unnecessary, but then I'm from NE England.

Coming from Australia I would say that the subtitles were mostly useful and only sometimes unnecessary. I'm ok with accents, but there's a lot of nuance that you miss when you're mostly infering from context.

That said, when we heard that the original Mad Max got dubbed for the US release we all fell around laughing

I was raised in the #1 most Anglophile home in the American Southwest, [and baptised on St George's Day], and so PBS was not optional, etc.

I can follow a wide variety of accents in this regard, slang, jargon and localized vocabulary, but subtitles still help a lot. Of course in foreign languages/dialects, our written proficiency/vocabulary may have a certain Venn overlap with the verbal skills.

When the dialogue is thick and lip-reading may fail, seeing the words is great. Often there may be unfamiliar words dropped in, or a sentence we couldn't decipher aurally, and there's the subtitle to spell it out for us.

I often subtitle American English shows as well. I suppose I'm simply addicted to reading words.

I was raised in Texas by yankees. Now I'm living in Israel with a British-born wife. I had no problem understanding that. It sounded to me like how some of my older friends in Texas talk plus a bit of slang. Maybe the exposure to British accent at home and a multitude of English accents at work and on the street helps.

With modern communications/media, I'm not sure to what degree with have true dialects any longer. But I worked in Louisiana for a few years back in the day and a friend of mine who grew up in Jacksonville told me to not feel bad because he often couldn't understand Cajun accents either.

I will run into people I know from northern England and some areas of Scotland at events and, especially in high noise environments like cocktail parties, I'm probably making out about half of what they say.

I'd say that's largely already happened and continues to. I know there's sometimes effort to give characters proper accents, but it's usually not too good. I did find it amusing to watch a show like Blue Bloods where they're all a local family, but all have different natural accents.

You also have places like Boston with very sub-regional accents. Southie accents are not really pervasive nor are Beacon Hill Brahmin accents. And, as you suggest, many of the residents are from all over the place.

It's the same in my hometown, Liverpool.

People from Bootle will have a different accent to people from Toxteth for example. 2 miles through a tunnel and you have the softer Scouse accent of the Wirral, the further from Birkenhead to Chester you get the less Scouse they sound.

Head south on the M62 and the Manc accent slowly melts into the Scouse, starting at roughly the Runcorn area.

A thick Cajun accent, which is relatively rare these days, is understandably difficult to make out: Their primary language isn't English at all. It's Cajun French. So they are a French speaker (with an uncommon French accent) speaking English.

Truly comedic moments from my work history. I was once the only London-based employee on a project principally done in Mumbai and Chicago. I’m pretty sure the principal reason I was on the project was I was the only person who understood everyone’s accents.

In my country there was a meme about having to do English listening exercises at school using very cheap speakers set up exactly in a way that you can't hear shit. Later someone made a counter-meme that this prepares you for the real-life situations where you have three Indians talking at once to one microphone from AliExpress and you need to figure out what they're saying.

Unfortunately, I have slight hearing deficiency, and working in an international environment is a nightmare, because for any given meeting, I understand 60% of what people say on a good day. Fortunately, I've learned that this doesn't really matter.

Strong Indian accents are very difficult for me. Less so in person, but on a Zoom call forget it. I end up asking them to email me.

Edit: added "Strong" qualifer, fwiw.

In 2005, I could believe this complaint because offshoring was still pretty new. But 2025, still... really? I find it hard to believe. This sounds like very low effort on your part. India is the size of a continent, and AI tells me: "India is roughly the same size as Europe (excluding Russia)." Can you imagine someone from India saying the reverse? <<"European" accents (whatever the hell that means because there are 50 countries in Europe!) are very difficult for me...>>

What is your native language, and what makes your struggle unique?

Do you also struggle to understand the myriad of other strong English accents, such as: Oz/Kiwi English, or Singlish (Singaporean/Malaysian English) or South African English, or Hongkonger English, or (Los Angeles) Valley Girl English (I jest here)... or French English, or whatever else? Plus, there are so many incredible YouTube content creators speaking English as a second (or third!) language these days... hell, it is like language accent training watching YouTube these days (hats of to them for publishing in a non-native language!).

I don't think it's unreasonable to find accents from places you don't live hard to understand. A lot of accents completely shift the vowel sounds. It can take a lot of familiarisation to start to understand what each sound means. Some people find this easier than others.

India is a huge country with a strong local tradition of speaking English. That means Indian English has a lot of local quirks that someone from outside the country wouldn't know.

I imagine everyone who speaks English struggles to understand strong accents that have significant shifts from their local one. I work with lots of French people speaking English, and even after years of daily conversations it can still be a struggle to understand them. I've got better over time, but it's not nearly as straightforward as listening to a native speaker.

You're essentially saying you don't believe the OP actually struggles to understand some accents. Is that really an outlandish claim?

> That means Indian English has a lot of local quirks that someone from outside the country wouldn't know.

Every accent is different. Every accent needs effort to understand. The point is that Indian English isn't uniquely difficult. It doesn't have very many unique words, other than obvious ones (prepone) or quirks that are easy to understand (kindly do the needful). And yet, racist white people from around the world, even ESL speakers, will take delight in shitting on Indian English while putting in zero effort to understand it.

But if the same white people heard a fellow white person say "I'm going to pick up my ute in the arvo while eating a jaffle" they'll happily look that up and expand their vocabulary.

> You're essentially saying you don't believe the OP actually struggles to understand some accents.

I'm saying people who have a problem with Indian English in particular are racist pricks.

Fuck these racist double standards and fuck anyone who defends it.

Good day to you though.

Any unfamiliar accent is difficult. The only question is the amount of effort we’re willing to put in to familiarise ourselves.

For example, I thought I had a decent handle on Scottish accents. Turns out I don’t, just that all the Scottish people I worked with were anglicising their accents. I only heard their natural accents after we had a few pints. Now I’m working with several Scottish people who don’t change their accent and it is hard. I’m thinking I probably have to watch a few seasons of Outlander to get used to it.

There’s nothing “natural” about any accent. How difficult was the Boston accent the first time you heard it? I needed subtitles for sure. Then I watched several movies set in Boston (Good Will Hunting, The Departed, The Town) and it’s understandable now.

All this to say - you need familiarity to understand and you need to put in effort to gain familiarity. That’s fairly uncontroversial.

Here’s the controversial part - people will put in the effort to understand the accents and dialects of people from Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America. But if it’s an accent/dialect from India, they say some racist shit about the brown people being unable to speak English.

So yes “Strong Indian accents are very difficult” for you. And now you know why.

I'm a) not a linguist and b) ESL - but I notice a stark different between Irish/Scottish/Texan (as a standin for a thick southern example) on the one hand and most Indian/African (both native) and French (as ESL) dialects on the other end. The former are doing a lot of different words, contractions and mostly different pronunciations, but the latter are often using the same words, no contractions but just speaking with a different stress on syllables and melody of the sentence and that's what makes it harder for me. But I am in no way disputing your "getting used to it" argument.

Also, and again I might be wrong, but I cannot for the life of me understand people from Glasgow but the rest of Scotland was pretty much fine when I was there. I know it's kinda different but lumping "Scottish" together is already weird. I'm from Bavaria, I know how it is - people who understand German can't understand us :P

The fact that you're willing to put in the effort for accents with different words, contractions and pronunciations but not willing to put in the effort for slightly different stress/melody is sadly quite common.

Someone saying "I'm going to pick up my ute in the arvo while I eat a jaffle" - sure, let me look up what that means. Whereas "Kindly do the needful" - no fuck this, you need to learn to fucking speak English.

I'd say the difference isn't what you've pointed out, it's the colour of the skin of the speaker. White people saying anything they feel like - the onus is on the listener to adapt. Brown/black people saying anything - they need to learn to speak English.

> lumping "Scottish" together is already weird

You lumping "Indian" together is equally weird. What's the matter? You can't tell the difference between a Tamil person and Malayali person speaking English? Spare me the condescension, please.

You are the only one that is acting racist here.

I put in the effort for every English accent I've encountered - French, Turkish, Greek, Scottish, Australian, Indian Canadian.

You put in the effort for white people's accents.

But sure, I'm the racist.

Typical isn't it? Indian person complains about racism and you immediately decide that complaining is racist. Says everything I need to know about you.

I grew up familiar with "do the needful", which I still use. I also grew up many thousands of miles from India. But my favorite Indian expression, which I learned later is to "prepone" something, as in the opposite of to "postpone" something. That one, I genuinely love. Neither of these are slang, like "ute" or "arvo", they're a thoughtful evolution of the language.

A data point from me: people in Chicago had real trouble understanding my English accent. Then I realised that when they had trouble understanding I reflexively said it again closer to Received Pronunciation i.e. even more English. Then i started imitating the Chicago accent and people understood me. They still thought I had an English accent, just not so thick they couldn’t understand me. English people who knew me found the way i talked to Chicagoans absolutely hilarious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pit0OkNp7s8 This Irish Sheep farmer is my favorite example of a hard to understand Irish accent. I've lived nearby to this location and can attest that it is quite common.

I have enough trouble processing spoken words without being able to see the person's face, let alone a tough accent. I think the most understandable English accents I've heard on a phone conversation are Jamaican and Russian. FTR, I'm US born and raised (mostly Arizona). They just tend to put a little be more emphasis on the words.

Reminds me of the old saw that a Jamaican saying 'bacon' and a brit saying 'beer can' are indistinguishable!

Imho, the Tangier accent is a lot more eclectic:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E&t=38s&pp=2AEmkAIB

Barrier islands from Maryland to Georgia are linguistically fascinating. (As someone who spent a lot of time around them as a kid)

These just sound like lost british people with a slight american twang

A few generations removed, but basically.

At the risk of crushing the website, American regional and enclave accents are a fascinating rabbit hole to go down:

https://aschmann.net/AmEng/#SmallMapUnitedStates

Or American students we've taken on a pub crawl and taught well.

I'm a former land surveyor (now DevOps guy) who spent a lot of summers during childhood on the eastern shore of Maryland, where we have relatives. I also did a lot of land surveys in the DelMarVa peninsula near the eastern shore of Virginia, as well as a lot of sonar work from boats on the Chesapeake Bay. And when I was a teen we used to sail boats out of Deal Island, MD and we'd often dock the boat on Smith Island, Tangier Island, and Ocracoke Island.

Anyway, starting as a teen I'd often hear these stories that there were "lost islands" on the Chesapeake Bay where the locals spoke "Elizabethan English." I suppose that might be the closest thing the dialect resembles, but I doubt it's much like what authentic Elizabethan English was. It's more like a mix of Old English, colonial-era American English, Scottish, and Irish with some old American Indian words mixed in. Basically, the guys who started "Talk Like a Pirate Day" should visit these islands to learn the dialect.

And of course a lot of times we'd come back from those trips with a Smith Island Cake for Mom.

A couple of years ago there were some guys from the power company in my backyard up in the Philly metro area cutting down tree limbs to make room for the electrical cables. They were up on a cherry picker and I went out in my backyard and I overheard them talking, and I recognized the accent in a second. I said, "Hey, are you guys from Salisbury?" They were very surprised and said "Princess Anne, how did you know?" and I said "I know a Somerset County accent anywhere" because it's how my relatives spoke.

There's almost a brummy (Birmingham) twang to it, interesting

The hook near the start (something about moonshine) is unintelligible for sure (and supposed to be) but honestly the rest of it is easier for me than a lot of mainland US accents! I am from the West Country as GP mentioned, it's not quite the same but certainly has a similar sort of drawl as the stereotypical local farmer.

(I haven't seen it but I believe there's a deliberately barely-intelligible character in Clarkson's Farm who's an example of it, if you're familiar. Or Hot Fuzz.)

> turn on captions for Trainspotting

Definitely needed subtitles the first five or so times for Trainspotting. Love that one! To be fair I need subtitles for almost all modern movies these days. My hearing or sound design are to blame... maybe both. :-/

"weawthelowestofthelow"

Trainspotting was partially dubbed for the American release to make it easier for Americans to understand.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/trainspottin...

When you grow up on an island (like Britain), where the accent changes every 20 miles or so, you get used to hearing a wide range of accents and being able to parse what is going on, so I think you're right.

But even for me, as a North Derbyshire/South Manchester type who had family from all over, Rab C. Nesbitt is only intelligible with subtitles. I wish that wasn't true, and I feel bad about it... even worse when I meet Scottish family and feel like an idiot.

Americans in particular are very, very easy to trick. As a teenager, when visiting family in Northern California, my step-brother and I could basically speak in "secret code" and be unintelligible to all Americans around us, by putting on a very, very mild Scouse lilt... absolutely hilarious.

You say that, but what comes to mind is the scene from Hot Fuzz where Simon Pegg's character needs a translator to understand a thick West Country accent.

https://youtu.be/Hs-rgvkRfwc?si=X6BjrTzK4hcKadeQ

Or Gerald on Clarkson's Farm... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLj_GARcO20

(I'm pretty sure his accent is exaggerated on purpose)

Again, where is the problem?

Close your eyes and _listen_, don't be distracted by the video.

Just Clarkson hamming things up.

Dude, why do you assume other folks hear things the way you do? Great, you’re an accent genius. Not everyone has the same perfect audio processing circuits as you do and not everyone has heard all the accents you have. Instead of insisting they just “try harder”, just believe them and consider how fascinating the diversity of human experience is and how incredibly superior your own understanding is, but please keep it to yourself.

How about looking earlier in the thread where we both mentioned which part of the Island we're from.

We're simply comparing ability to distinguish other regional accents on the Island, not putting each other down. Generally folks here get to hear lots of different forms of spoken English.

and no - I ain't no "accent genius", there are parts of the Scouse, Brummie, and Durham accents I have trouble with.

Different accents pose different levels of difficulty to different people, just like most things. Not sure if it was your intention but yur responses come across quite dismissively.

Except Amazon's own subtitle group have issues understanding Gerald. To the point his subtitles are often just "????"

That’s a joke lol

I am from the west country (and recognize people in the show) and there really are people that speak like that, including dropping off in the middle of a sentence. We had someone working on our farm that was very hard for most people to understand - basically the same accent/dialect.

Yeah - OK. That one took me about 5 plays to be able to distinguish it.

> Just sounds like they're from the West Country.

Yes, for many Americans (myself included), that’s the problem.

I have the same trouble with many Appalachian accents which are also sort of a mix of West Country and Scottish accents due to historical immigration patterns.

It's not that hard to understand when it's not fast like the fishing in bright light part you mentioned IMO. I've had much more trouble with some very thick NYC accents and Caribbean accents (although I put that down more to vocabulary preferences - when the phrasing isn't what you expect it's harder to understand).

I think being English really helps here.

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