A question about accents

[BuffJim]

10 minutes ago, shootingstar said:

How really different are the accents?  Which is incredible..just across the bombing Niagara Falls/River.

Fort Erie or Niagara Falls accent is much closer to a Calgary accent than a Buffalo accent. It just is. 

[sheep_herder ★]

True story, I think two women were investigated in northern Montana for speaking Spanish in a grocery store. I only knew about it because it made the papers. Probably can find it with Google.

[maddmaxx ★]

37 minutes ago, shootingstar said:

I had to look up rhoticism.

When I had to learn English as a kid, I did have to practice my "r" and consonant blends ie.  fr,  tr gr, fl, etc.  Certain consonant blends in English take time for a Chinese speaker to perfect.

Yes, when people make fun of Asians speaking English, honest it's very tiring: now YOU speak Chinese, etc.

xie xie.

[Allen ★]

10 minutes ago, sheep_herder said:

Heck, there are different accents depending upon what part of Texas one is from.

There are different accents on opposite sides of my county. 

[Further]

37 minutes ago, shootingstar said:

Yes, when people make fun of Asians speaking English, honest it's very tiring: now YOU speak Chinese, etc.

There was an engineer from Poland at work, he was difficult to understand until you had spent some time around him. Guys used to bitch that they couldn't understand him, I always told them that I bet his English beat the hell out of their Polish... 

[Ralphie ★]

34 minutes ago, Further said:

There was an engineer from Poland at work, he was difficult to understand until you had spent some time around him. Guys used to bitch that they couldn't understand him, I always told them that I bet his English beat the hell out of their Polish... 

I once worked with a Chinese guy and I had to have him email me because I couldn’t understand a single |~{#^*¥ word he said!

 

[shootingstar]

He's a white Canadian guy highly fluent in Mandarin...and a very popular comedian in China.  He knows how toe the fine line between gentle humour and political topics. There for past few decades. He is married to a Chinese woman. I don't know any Mandarin nor do my parents. He's making fun of how to say gung hei fat choy....Happy Chinese New Year.

Canada has used him for various commercials..

Now I just realized he's actually playing off  2 dialects in one liners between Mandarin and Cantonese....and making fun of  Cantonese speaking people...in the south. He points some basic differences between the 2 dialects.

 

 

Below about a closing bookstore in Beijing  (Max, your son might have heard of this guy when he was in China):

 

[Wilbur ★]

1 hour ago, Philander Seabury said:

I once worked with a Chinese guy and I had to have him email me because I couldn’t understand a single |~{#^*¥ word he said!

 

 

[Ralphie ★]

2 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

 

Somehow I don’t think “interrogative” helped any.

 

[shootingstar]

18 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

 

Only watched part of it, Wilbur. So your point is????

You have to understand, we couldn't speak English too quickly with my father....but for him to master English fluently as an adult, in his 30's. to read the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star was a fuckin' enormous feat with 5 young children after  long hard days at  work in restaurant.

then he had to translate for his children to his wife,  in the midst of family arguments.

And people wonder why even keep a mother tongue.

[Wilbur ★]

12 minutes ago, shootingstar said:

Only watched part of it, Wilbur. So your point is????

You have to understand, we couldn't speak English too quickly with my father....but for him to master English fluently as an adult, in his 30's. to read the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star was a fuckin' enormous feat with 5 young children after  long hard days at  work in restaurant.

then he had to translate for his children to his wife,  in the midst of family arguments.

And people wonder why even keep a mother tongue.

If I was making a point it would be that Air China constantly breaks international aviation laws in allowing non-english fluent speakers to operate outside China's airspace.  

I wasn't making a point though, it was merely a reflection on a post by another poster. 

[shootingstar]

My point, is English is a power language.... but it doesn't make us better, more intelligent. It certainly does put us in enormous position of privilege we take for granted. Blind privilege.

Let the fluent speakers of a language make fun of the language. I did show these video clips just ..sayin' what it means to be really fluent in a 2nd language, that you can do clever wordplay and respect your audience at same time.  However the featured  comedian had cultural understanding to know how to deliver the jokes.

[Wilbur ★]

3 minutes ago, shootingstar said:

My point, is English is a power language.... but it doesn't make us better, more intelligent. It certainly does put us in enormous position of privilege we take for granted. Blind privilege.

Let the fluent speakers of a language make fun of the language. I did show these video clips just ..sayin' what it means to be really fluent in a 2nd language, that you can do clever wordplay and respect your audience at same time.  However the featured  comedian had cultural understanding to know how to deliver the jokes.

I wasn't getting involved in the discussion in any depth, nor do I have a desire to.  At my peak, I spoke 4 languages fluently.   I did it because it made me a lot better and a lot safer in my line of work.  

[shootingstar]

Hanging Onto My Broken Mother Tongue – Cycle Write Blog (wordpress.com)  Because in a way, it's tied so deeply to my life experiences.  I never picked up much German from dearie nor did he learn much Chinese from me.  What I did pick up a bit was more German cultural modern vibes when I worked for a German global engineering firm ...

He too, like myself, didn't learn English until entering into school. What is most interesting is that alot of Canadians I personally know, who were born speaking another language, and then learned English in school, then they lost their a large chunk of their mother tongue fluency. These folks wouldn't claim they xxx fluently, instead they would say I can speak some and must speak it with xxxxx (usually family, etc.).  They wanted to  make sure they wouldn't claim true fluency, just in case of embarrassing themselves....because they knew what true fluency meant....participating (without a translator) for several hrs. on long complicated topics, writing and reading at least at a high school level.