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Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

bbc.com

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Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#111

Post by okareaman »

_delirium wrote: post #102
okareaman wrote: post #40

As an older person who probably needs a hearing aid, I have the most problem with native English speakers not enunciating words. They go fast and run words together or mumble like Noam Chomsky. I have sympathy for ESL people trying to parse it. I always turn on subtitles if available. Also, a Brazilian friend says the don't use much sarcasm, so it gets difficult understand when English speakers use it so much to mean…

I definitely have had this issue. I'm a native English speaker and taught in Europe for a few years, where a subset of students had trouble understanding me, mostly because I would just drop too many consonants and run words together. E.g. if speaking quickly, I tend to pronounce "because" as one syllable, something like "biz". I've moved towards much more consciously enunciating words in mixed-nationality settings.…

All of us with hearing loss in the human speech frequency range appreciate your efforts!

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#112

Post by klodolph »

dvh wrote: post #29

In one episode of Black Books, main character Manny finds out he can play piano. Other character Bernard wants to use it to impress a woman, so he forces Manny to hide inside the piano and play using spoons. Manny does it but later refuses to do it again. To convince him to do it one more time, Bernard offers him one whole week of vacation. Manny looks at Bernard, then extend his arms forwards, palms open up, and say…

I think what you are talking about is really analytic vs synthetic languages. English is more analytic than most European languages, but there are other languages which are also analytic, like Mandarin, Swedish, and Maori.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language

In analytic languages, speakers use word order and additional words to convey relationships. However, this does not mean that analytic languages are simpler, it just means that the complexity is different.

For example, English usually requires that you use the correct word order, correct articles, and correct prepositions. "A customer is angry about the movie." You cannot change word order. You must use the correct article ("a" customer, "the" movie), and correct preposition ("angry about", not "angry at"). In some other languages, these details like "a" / "the" are not important.

Sentences like "Spoon me" or "beer me" rely on the fact that English uses word order instead of declension. The sentence must have a verb, and "me" is not a verb, so the word before "me" is treated as a verb. The words are simple and flexible, but the word order is very strict.

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#113

Post by teachingassist »

refactor_master wrote: post #96
narag wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned in any language-related discussion is that understanding is often a matter of discarding possible "neighbouring" meanings. To do that, you need to have a comprehensive knowledge of the language. In English it's particularly bad because of the proximity between some vowels. In many cases a monosyllabic word is one of six or seven almost identical. And that's for basic vocabulary…

I’ve experienced this problem for native and non-native speakers alike, where perfectly capable English speakers almost freeze up when they mishear a word, rather than try to help the conversation along. I’d usually ask the other party to spell it out, whereas some simply drop the conversation dead and awkward silence ensues.

> perfectly capable English speakers almost freeze up when they mishear a word, rather than try to help the conversation along.

As a person who speaks a second language I learned as an adult, I find this situation incredibly difficult to negotiate.

In my first language, I can get through almost any such situation by using humour. In my second language, at best, I can manage 'just one more time?' with a frowny face.

I often think - why wasn't I taught this skill in any language school I attended?

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#115

Post by riffraff »

Many years ago I had the chance to work in a research institute in Ireland.

A common line for newcomers who worried about their ability to speak was that we had 25 or 35 different nationalities, and the Irish were the only ones having problems communicating in English.

It is pretty obvious if you think about it, and not specific to any language: native speakers of X have to make an effort to speak "international basic X" and they are generally not used to do that.

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#116

Post by jessaustin »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #9

> Native English speakers are the world's worst communicators The article makes this claim, but doesn't substantiate it. The content of the article has nothing to do with a comparative study on communication. Always disappointing to see clickbait from the BBC. I suggest the title be changed to something like Native English speaker are generally bad at tuning into language variation . edit I see NikolaeVarius beat me…

Perhaps TFA was written by a native English speaker?

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#117

Post by domano »

I see this happening regurarily and i have to say that it heavily depends on the native speakers nationality.

Americans (at least if they don't speak some thick dialect) are easy to understand due to movies etc.

Brits are ok enough, but some dialects get tricky.

Irish and scottish usually are not understood by the absolute majority of participants. I pride myself in my ability to understand spoken english (relative to my peers here in germany at least) but even for me it is nearly impossible to understand an irishman talking over zoom etc. with some random headset.

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#118

Post by scbrg »

gus_massa wrote: post #66
bellyfullofbac wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably not this, but a native English speaker saying "That's the shit!" probably means "That thing is great" but someone who's not very fluent might think the speaker doesn't like the thing.

I guess it happens in all languages. Here in Argentina sometimes you can use some insults as a great compliment to a friend. [It's tricky to know when you can use them, which one, and have the correct intonation and body posture, so don't try it.] And you can use a compliment like " Muy bien. Te feliciiito. " (" Very good. I congratulate you. " But with a long ee sound in the middle of the last word) And it means som…

I had a chuckle a while back when here on HN, one poster replied to another with the words: Oh, fuck off! The next sentence was That's amazing! Turns out that they were quite happy about the information in the parent post. Something like "I wish I had known that five years ago."

I thought to myself, that has to be a Brit, but admittedly I'm not familiar enough with the way various native speakers of English use the language to know for sure. To us furriners, it can sure be a bit confusing some times :)

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#119

Post by [deleted] »

solatic wrote: post #69
MereInterest wrote: post #33

I think the point of avoiding acronyms and abbreviations isn't strong enough, because it doesn't explain how much they can creep into most conversation. As an example, here's how something can become gradually less specific, and gradually shortened. (I have an American Midwest accent, so not all of these shortenings will be applicable to all accents.) > I'm hungry. Would you like to get lunch and continue discussing…

To be fair, "Did you eat yet?" in this context seems to be universal across languages and cultures for office workers. The "Djeet yet?" will naturally be different depending on language and accent, but my point is that this is not exclusive to the English language. Someone who is familiar with the practice of asking if a coworker has eaten their midday meal in their native tongue will recognize the same nuance if the…

[deleted]

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#120

Post by shkkmo »

I think there is a fundemental misattribution where the author talks about monolingual speakers.

Speaking to non-native speakers in a language is a seperate skill that can be learned without proficiency in a second language. It takes skill and care to keep your sentence structure simple and independent of semantic nuance or idiom.

People for whom English is a lingua franca have almost exclusively used English to speak to other non-native speakers and have lots of practice doing this.

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