Some questions and comments from a noob

Bramblethorn said:

obligatory Hot Fuzz scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw

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Love that movie. And that's Walder Frey!

SimonDoom said:

From an American point of view, I think by far the hardest English language dialect/accent to understand is a really thick, heavy Scottish accent. Sometimes it doesn't sound like English at all.

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It’s not only the USA. A couple of friends went to Japan for 8 weeks. They found that if they wanted to speak in private they put on a thick Scottish accent. Conversely, sometimes if they wanted to talk to someone at a tourist spot they had to use a generic American accent because their Australian one was incomprehensible.

Russ

I suppose the general English perception of an American accent would be fairly easy to follow--monotone and a slow drawl. I did a lot of stage work with English ex-pats overseas and this was always what they came up with if they had a Brit in an American part. I was not amused. I'm sure they that my English stage accept was hilarious.

KeithD said:

I suppose the general English perception of an American accent would be fairly easy to follow--monotone and a slow drawl. I did a lot of stage work with English ex-pats overseas and this was always what they came up with if they had a Brit in an American part. I was not amused. I'm sure they that my English stage accept was hilarious.

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The US may have fewer distinct regional accents than Britain does. Not that we Amaricans know them all - when working in England, I several times had people ask me confidently "You can tell I'm not local, can't you?" No. No I couldn't. But to someone knowledgeable (ie, not me) apparently 100 miles can make an enormous difference.

I do find it amusing that to Europeans, my inland-northern-California accent codes as "default American, like on TV" It confuses them unutterably if I lapse into the Oklahoma accent I learned from my grandmother.

Rustyoznail said:

It’s not only the USA. A couple of friends went to Japan for 8 weeks. They found that if they wanted to speak in private they put on a thick Scottish accent. Conversely, sometimes if they wanted to talk to someone at a tourist spot they had to use a generic American accent because their Australian one was incomprehensible.

Russ

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Remembering back when I was learning Mandarin, talking to another Australian who was also learning Mandarin from the same textbook. We could understand one another, but the native Mandarin speaker couldn't.

Only somewhat related, but when I started to learn English it was mostly through games like Pokemon and other non-voiced mediums. As such, I tended to come up with my own horrible pronunciations since my parents didn't speak English very well either. While I had an advantage when it came to vocabulary and knowing sentence structures in high school, I had to spend a lot of time learning proper pronunciation. To this day my English is a Frankenstein of a handful of British and American accents, depending on where I picked up the pronunciation from (movies, series, modern games, etc.). Although my American friend that I call sometimes does say my accent is easy to understand, so it's not that bad I suppose.

I roughly learned Spanglish whilst growing up in Southern California. I later took a Spanish course from a Cuban refugee, and much later at a Guatemala language school. Everyone laughed at my varied accents. My Spanish is not your Spanish.

And SoCal Anglish ain't Tennessee or Texas or Toledo Anglish. I can barely understand my Eastern relatives at family gatherings. Might as well be Korean.

Hypoxia said:

I can barely understand my Eastern relatives at family gatherings. Might as well be Korean.

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I have the same problem with some of my relatives. They might just as well be Welsh. Oh, yeah, that's right: they are!

I'm from California, but I teach somewhere with a wicked heavy accent. My students mock me all the damn time, but they're the ones that sound like weirdos.

I have made concessions, though, mostly to shut them up. I force myself to say "roof" instead of "ruf" these days, but I'll never compromise on pronouncing "salsa" with a z-sound in the middle.