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Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

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

#181

Post by astrange »

henearkr wrote: post #168
Iv wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a French living in Japan one of the things I quickly learned is that if I complain about something while showing even a hint of anger or annoyingness, my interlocutor will take it personally, even if he/she is not involved about the thing as well.

Was you complaint about something related to Japan or the life there or the administration? Japanese people very easily feel compelled to defend their group, because if not they are often treated as "anti-japanese" by the most right-wing (which are the most vocal) of their relations/neighbors. This in turn leads to a lot of self-censorship.

Whenever I've met a French speaker in Japan (which happens surprisingly often) I have always been amazed at their ability to be just as direct in Japanese as they are in French. It turns my ears red and I'm American.

I don't think it's about their opinions, it's just a language you have to be more polite in. Doesn't feel any different from the South or UK to me.

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

#182

Post by astrange »

Iv wrote: post #159
markdown wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A: "Should I launch the nukes?" B: "Fuck no" A: *Initiates launch*

Laugh, but talking with Japanese, something that often happens is: A: "Shouldn't I launch the nukes?" B: "No." Can be understood as "yes, do it" because they are used to an opposite logic when answering negation. "Yes" means "I agree with the negation" and no the opposite. And they seem to have a hard time accepting that the logic is different in English.

That's because はい/いいえ doesn't mean yes/no, it means correct/incorrect. Though the yes/no response to negative questions is also different in American and British English.

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

#183

Post by novok »

bsder wrote: post #148
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,…

> I ended up solving the problem by organizing a very nice lunch, where everyone realized the 'others' were actually nice and friendly human beings, and that email was not always the best way to communicate. Email is terribly crappy. You completely lose language nuance. I always try to give people the biggest benefit of the doubt even when I'm certain that the person on the other side of the email is a raging asshole…

Its more than a face, it's also tone of voice, posture, and so on. With it gone, people tend to assume the worst, because humans are biased to interpreting things in the negative when something is ambiguous.

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

#184

Post by astrange »

sampo wrote: post #37
pbourke wrote: post #21

> The non-native speakers, it turns out, speak more purposefully and carefully, typical of someone speaking a second or third language. Anglophones, on the other hand, often talk too fast for others to follow, and use jokes, slang and references specific to their own culture, says Chong Isn’t this a description of native vs non-native speakers in many languages?

> Isn’t this a description of native vs non-native speakers in many languages? I'd venture to guess, that only with English you can find businesses that run in English but native speakers are a minority in the company.

There's other cultures where most people don't natively speak the business language/dialect - not all Chinese speakers are native Mandarin for instance.

Actually, there's some Japanese companies that try to use English in the office even if they don't have any foreigners.

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

#185

Post by yongjik »

astrange wrote: post #182
Iv wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laugh, but talking with Japanese, something that often happens is: A: "Shouldn't I launch the nukes?" B: "No." Can be understood as "yes, do it" because they are used to an opposite logic when answering negation. "Yes" means "I agree with the negation" and no the opposite. And they seem to have a hard time accepting that the logic is different in English.

That's because はい/いいえ doesn't mean yes/no, it means correct/incorrect. Though the yes/no response to negative questions is also different in American and British English.

Saying hai is "correct" is misleading in its own way: no English-speaking child will say "correct" to "Would you want some ice cream?", but "hai" is what a Japanese kid would say.

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

#186

Post by astrange »

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…

If they were speaking Japanese, Finnish (and Spanish) have very similar phonetics, to the point a lot of Finnish words also mean totally unrelated things in Japanese.

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

#187

Post by astrange »

antonvs wrote: post #149
jogjayr wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nope. Parent was attempting a weird joke, which failed badly.

I think it's used in marketing sometimes because it sounds cool, so you'll assume it means something good if you don't understand it. Doesn't come up a lot though.

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

#188

Post by Gauge_Irrahphe »

tomcooks wrote: post #123
Gauge_Irrahphe wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that most languages go into a much deeper level of detail than English does, by default.

? Which languages and in which contexts?

At the very least Indians, Chinese and Japanese complain about those, and English speakers who learn them face the opposite problem, at least with the latter two, so it isn't a native/non native problem.

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

#189

Post by fomine3 »

tomcooks wrote: post #122
riffraff wrote: post #115

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 basi…

The Anglosphere covers more than half of the world, being used to deal with other cultures and adapting to that should be taken for granted.

Not more than half.

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

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

#190

Post by Gauge_Irrahphe »

freeflight wrote: post #129
tomcooks wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

? Which languages and in which contexts?

Gendered articles and honorifics come to mind, that's where for example German has more "details" that afaik don't really exist in a comparable version in English, like duzen vs siezen.

Not like that. It's more about what amount of information you are expected to share in any given context vs. what would be seen as excessive, such as would you expect to hear "there was an accident" or "a valve broke and the cooling fluid spilled".

You won't find things like this in a grammar book, it's kid of more like what bitrate the language aims for.

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