Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 261 posts

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

#131

Post by ksec »

Agingcoder wrote: post #85

There is another aspect beyond raw vocabulary and grammar, and that's unspoken cultural assumptions :not abbreviations and slang, but real misunderstandings caused by different understandings of what seems to be a set of perfectly obvious sentences to both sides . A branch of my company went through a merger with another branch in a different country, and with a different language. Needless to say, it was difficult,…

>but real misunderstandings caused by different understandings of what seems to be a set of perfectly obvious sentences to both sides.

Yes. Especially true when it happens between an American and a Brit.

Also true between Germans and Brits, when the Germans are so good with their English, the precision with their wordings which tends to trigger some Brits.

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

#132

Post by jogjayr »

lebuffon wrote: post #36

Two thoughts come to mind. 1. At one time in human history, not long ago, it was mandatory to have some facility in at least a 2nd language to claim you had a higher education. Partial mastery of a 2nd language would help native English speakers "get" what it's like for the non-native people and might help them adjust there speaking style. IMHO we have allowed "higher" education in English speaking countries to devol…

Until today I thought "Lingua Franca" just meant "French language" and the usage of the phrase signified how commonplace French was in international diplomacy. Glad to learn something new.

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

#134

Post by jogjayr »

jessaustin wrote: post #114
b0b0b0b wrote: post #16

Was the word “inflammable”?

I'm guessing "penultimate". Non-native speakers look up the dictionary definition, while the average American knows it means "really awesome".

"Penultimate" is American slang for "really awesome"?

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

#136

Post by dejj »

I'm German. I've had an Arabic colleague translate (=dumb down) my English to another German colleague. Vocabulary was the issue. "I think I spider."[1] It felt like having to rewrite a map-reduce to a loop in order to pass code review.

[1] http://ithinkispider.com/

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

#137

Post by ska »

klodolph wrote: post #112
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…

See e.g. OSACOMP rule for adjectives. Something most native speakers don't realize they know (but they do).

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

#138

Post by ska »

leoedin wrote: post #53
bogle wrote: post #18

You can learn how to be better understood as a native speaker without having to go abroad or even speak to a lot of people using English as a second language. In the UK, live in a city like Birmingham, for instance, with a strong local accent and even, in some parts like the Black Country, a unique syntax, e.g. "How am ya?". Now go live for a while in, for the sake of argument, Glasgow, with their own particular pato…

Conversely, I lived for a while with a Glaswegian who had moved to the South of England, having lived his whole life in Glasgow. It was interesting watching him realise that he had to moderate his speech, otherwise so much of what he said was lost. Over time, he stopped using some of the specifically regional stuff that nobody understood.

This is complicated because Scots (distinct from Gaelic) is a language - with multiple dialects (you wouldn't speak Doric in Glasgow) - and people from Scotland freely intermix with English. If you've grown up there as an English speaker you may not even realized it until you move somewhere it isn't spoken, so lots of loan words etc. you are used to don't exist.

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

corpMaverick wrote: post #109

As a non native speaker I struggle with this. I work with some native speakers which are more articulate, use a more complex sentence structure, speak faster and speak a lot longer. I often loose track of what they are saying and it is very hard to argue against them. I feel like a three year old.

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by trainsplanes »

lebuffon wrote: post #57

Amusing anecdote. I was in a class with a Japanese instructor. I had a great deal of trouble understanding him. A hand was raised and a person began talking with a very different accent (Finnish) and I understood very little of that. The Japanese instructor understood the question and replied. I however understood almost nothing of the entire exchange. This may be the future for native English language speakers or pe…

As a non-native speaker of a non-English language, I'm often the "translator" for other non-native speakers, helping native speakers understand them.

Really all I'm doing is repeating what the non-native speaker said verbatim, but with an accent that the native speaker is more familiar with.

Post reply on HN