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Heeey There! I've got a question for y'all...

de ZOV, 6 de fevereiro de 2009

Mensagens: 89

Idioma: English

69UM24OSU12 (Mostrar o perfil) 8 de fevereiro de 2009 06:27:22

I come from the Detroit area where the people speak with perhaps the flattest, blandest, white-bread accent in the English-speaking world. Any variations sound interesting to me. I like the accents just a couple hundred miles north in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which approximate the Minnesota accent that you hear in the movie "Fargo." I also like the southern drawls, the western twangs and the British accents.

I guess that languages with a lot of guttural sounds kind of turn me off. I've heard some where it sounds like everyone is constantly clearing their throats.

Frakseno (Mostrar o perfil) 9 de fevereiro de 2009 21:54:45

I'd have to say that it bugs me to hear a man speak French, but I love to hear a woman speak it. Not certain why, it's just kind of a gut reaction...

Rogir (Mostrar o perfil) 9 de fevereiro de 2009 22:33:01

That probably has to do with the French people.

Ironchef (Mostrar o perfil) 9 de fevereiro de 2009 22:39:49

Some of you dislike hearing accents of your own languages which I think is different from hearing another language you don't understand because then you are just focusing on the sounds. This is fascinating to me because I'm English, from just north of London to be precise where you hear "Estuary English", and if you're familiar with people like David Beckham or his wife Posh Spice, or the TV chef, Jamie Oliver, you soon get the idea.

I always loved hearing Irish girls and Welsh girls speaking. I like hearing people from NSW, it sounds relaxed and informal. Hearing someone from Helsinki speaking English usually sounds mechanical and forced.

I live in Maine USA now. I've read at least 2 people here saying they dislike the Maine/New England accent. I think, personally, that people up here speak more of a British regional English than they do American. If you put a Mainer and someone from Devon or Wiltshire in a room together, apart from obvious local vocab differences, it wouldn't be hard for them to adjust to each other's accents.

I also find it amazing that Americans have a hard time with British regional accents (or Australian!). When I see someone from Manchester England on the TV with subtitles I crack up. Maybe us Brits just have more exposure to other accents than you do?

I don't really dislike any accents but I do think they give you preconceptions about people's intelligence; why is that? Why does someone speaking "BBC English" sound smarter than someone from, say, Johannesburg? I dislike people misusing English grammar, that totally puts me off. I also speak German and Dutch so I laughed at those comments too.

Zafur (Mostrar o perfil) 9 de fevereiro de 2009 23:03:30

Haha. I dislike the Romance languages. Spanish in particular. That "songlike" thing I hear a lot of people talk about is actually rather annoying to me, instead of making it sound better. Tonal languages also sound odd. Some are better than others. I prefer the Germanic languages, Japanese also sounds good.

I also kind of wonder why some Hispanics in my area switch their t's , d's and th's. They CAN say them perfectly, but they just use them on the wrong words... It stands out a lot.

I'm from New York myself, and I'm not sure if you're talking about the normal Brooklyn accent, or the overly ghetto one? I agree the ghetto one is annoying, although living in it everyday of my life has made it more tolerable. For "Yo, how you doin'!" thing, most NYers actually kind of make it overly accented on purpose for various reasons. To be "fun" when greeting friends, etc. I hear it said in a more neutral tone all the time. I'm not totally sure why so many people can recognize a Brooklyn/New York accent? I guess if I over analyzed it, it sticks out but if someone came from California or so, they'd sound normal to me.(Ignoring the "Valley Girl" accent.)

I don't hear a lot of accents from other regions, and I don't usually recognize them, unless they're being heavily stereotyped (Irish, Southern U.S.A, etc), but certain accents I just cannot understand. These aren't usually from another English speaking country. Most British and Canadian accents are pretty simple for me to understand.

andogigi (Mostrar o perfil) 10 de fevereiro de 2009 02:19:35

Ironchef:
I think, personally, that people up here speak more of a British regional English than they do American. If you put a Mainer and someone from Devon or Wiltshire in a room together, apart from obvious local vocab differences, it wouldn't be hard for them to adjust to each other's accents.

I also find it amazing that Americans have a hard time with British regional accents (or Australian!). When I see someone from Manchester England on the TV with subtitles I crack up. Maybe us Brits just have more exposure to other accents than you do?
Sorry to change the subject, but you touched on something I've been curious about for a long time. I once read that some New England towns still burn Guy Fawkes once a year on Bonfire night. Have you experienced this?

ceigered (Mostrar o perfil) 10 de fevereiro de 2009 04:40:32

Ironchef:"Estuary English"
Australian English gets a lot out of that book okulumo.gif (well, specifically cockney, but over time it's become more like Estuary English than full-blown cockney). I take it you guys also have the intrusive 'r' in phrases like 'make her a cake', and the occasional glottal stop etc?

Ironchef:I also find it amazing that Americans have a hard time with British regional accents (or Australian!). When I see someone from Manchester England on the TV with subtitles I crack up. Maybe us Brits just have more exposure to other accents than you do?
I would say thats because the British and Australians get heaps of US TV, and Australians get lots of British TV, and the British just have more differing accents, but the US probably doesn't get the same exposure from Britain and Australia.

RiotNrrd (Mostrar o perfil) 10 de fevereiro de 2009 06:33:04

ceigered:...US probably doesn't get the same exposure from Britain and Australia.
No, we definitely don't. The British shows we do see, on PBS (our Public Broadcasting System), BBC America, and a few others, were nearly all made with an eye towards eventually being seen by American audiences. Everyone on those shows speaks nice and clear.

When I was a kid some 30 years ago, the ONLY British shows we saw were on PBS. Some of those were simply transplants, made specifically for British audiences without thought that they might be shown in the US. I swear: some of them were utterly unintelligible to me and to everyone else around me. We could pick out words here and there, but it was mostly like listening to a foreign language. And I had even spent a year in Australia by that time.

"Brobro brorawg broro eena wumpet, gvnuh?"
"Ebblth brythnrwth brrbrr."
(Audience) "Ha ha ha ha ha."

We'd watch for a while, but it was just too much work.

We have very picky ears over here. rideto.gif

jan aleksan (Mostrar o perfil) 10 de fevereiro de 2009 10:08:37

Personnally, I don't really like the weird sounds you can find in Chinese and Arabic. Chinese has also tone, and french people generally don't like any kind of intonation or accentation, it's hard for us, because it's something that doesn't matter in understanding the french.

I have nothing against american english. It's simply that the pure american is really difficult to understand, such that it's seems strange that people understand each other their. One day on yahoo Q/R, I read a question named "How french people understand each other" because the language seems so strange for the guy that's it seemed impossible to communicate with it according to him. I feel more or less the same for american english, but I guess you can communicate (don't you?).

ridulo.gif,

erinja (Mostrar o perfil) 10 de fevereiro de 2009 15:46:19

RiotNrrd:"Brobro brorawg broro eena wumpet, gvnuh?"
"Ebblth brythnrwth brrbrr."
(Audience) "Ha ha ha ha ha."
This is so funny, I've had this exact experience, I started laughing here at work, just reading your description.

Another factor in Americans' difficulty understanding accents is that most British TV that reaches our screens is old - from the 60's-80's. Old British TV is often pretty much straight-off RP English. There are a few accent differences to show social class, but very few regional accents. Only in more recent years has British TV in general begun to reflect more regional accents. These newer programs are hard to find on US TV, and in most cases, can only be seen on BBC America.

Australian accents are hard for us because American TV shows no Australian programs whatsoever, and there's only the lightest smattering of Australian actors who speak in their native accents on our TV.

Regarding subtitling, I often feel that US TV goes overboard. People who have a foreign accent are sometimes subtitled, even if they aren't especially hard to understand. This increases in low-end TV; so a news program probably wouldn't subtitle a person with a foreign accent, but a reality TV show probably would. Americans meet a lot of people who don't speak English natively, and it's hard for me to believe that they really need these subtitles.

Then again, there's an English guy in my office that my group sometimes does projects with; he speaks with a Northern accent, which is not really too strange, as English regional accents go. But one of my co-workers can barely understand him at all, even though she has spent a lot of time in England (albeit in the South).

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