There is lot of difference between American English and other English. But the fact is they are not accepting and asking question as are your native language is English or not. This makes most of the people to become hurt in doing conversation with Americans.
This post is hurting me.
I was discussing the film, “Trainspotting” with a few coworkers and one (native Georgian with a strong coastal Georgian accent) couldn’t understand anything said in the movie. She walked out.
I thought it was odd at the time. I understood the Scottish accent after a moment or too. I’m from NYC and I suppose I’m used to deciphering accents.
I know there are differences and some people can be rude. I’m sorry if anyone has hurt your feelings.
Is that what that is? Doing conversation? Because I don’t think I want to do that.
I don’t know if this is why they actually changed the name, but there was already an American show called The Good Life, starring Larry Hagman. Pretty good too, as I recall. That was Hagman between I Dream of Jeannie and Dallas.
As for British accents that can’t be understood, the great director Ken Loach routinely includes subtitles in his films even though they’re in English!
My understanding was that he was an American bartender talking to a Brit.
Our brains are continually attempting to parse speech into something that makes sense.
Hence the phenomenon of mondegreens, and “hearing” someone say something utterly ridiculous when you don’t understand them – you don’t “hear” something garbled, typically; rather, your brain does its best and serves up words, even if they mean nothing.
But in the case of a Brit hearing an American bartender offer “temeda” on a hamburger, if they hear the pronunciation distinctly, in many cases the brain will not associate that word with “tuh-mah-to” (after all, the only similarities are the T and the M) but will register it as “temeda” and wonder “What in the world is temeda?” Perhaps it’s some sort of sauce.
So I’m not surprised at all that on occasion a Brit asks what “temeda” is when it’s offered as a condiment on a sandwich.
I want to have her children.
Right, I understand that, but I thought he said *he *was a Brit working in the southern United States and *he *pronounced it as “tuh-may-to.”
I just don’t see how that would be an unfamiliar pronunciation to Americans. “Tuh-mah-to” sounds British to me, not the other way around. Unless he meant to say he did *not *use the long a, then it would make sense.
I’m always surprised that they changed the name of JK Rowling’s eponymous wizard to “Hairy Padder” for the American market …
Anecdote: my Kiwi mate and I were in the Tourist Information office in Memphis (Tennessee, not Egypt) and he was asking Lawanduh behind the counter about where we might hire a car (to get us to Nashville). Lawanduh had terrible trouble understanding him, although to me he sounded far from difficult, having lived in various parts of England and Wales for about 8 years by then: “Say what??” “You wanna hire a what?” and finally “You wanna hire a COW???” I decided it was time to intervene, speaking clearly and Americanly: “He. Would. Like. To. RENT. A. Vee-Hickle”. Job done! In the end, we went by Greyhound bus (with an E!).
Yeah, an American would never “hire” a car.
Ok. I read it bassackwards b/c of the reference to the “long” a. Actually, Americans use the long a (as in “date”) for tomato.
Yeah, actually, that does surprise me more than Brits being puzzled by “temeda”.
Not too long ago I was at the infantry museum in Columbus, GA and went for some popcorn before going into the IMAX. The girl at concessions wasn’t a native, and when I asked “What do you get for a small popcorn?” she was completely flummoxed. When I realized she wasn’t a Southerner, I rephrased and asked her “How much is a small popcorn?”
I used to have a buddy from Wisconsin when I lived in Athens, and sometimes he’d laugh out loud at things I said, which I thought everybody said. Like when he paid a fellow to bush-hog some land, I said, “I wonder what he’d take to cut that field in front of my house.” That was just hilarious.
The problem certainly exists in reverse.
While those on TV are generally fine, real life Americans tend to have much thicker accents than those you hear on TV. They can be pretty incomprehensible to someone not used to American accents, especially over the phone on a transatlantic line - I have real difficulties then (probably asking for about 50% of what’s said to be repeated).
Oh, yeah.
Add to that, they usually have actors doing so-so tidewater Carolina accents for any Southern role, regardless of where the character is from.
Sissy Spacek is a rare exception. She’s a Texan, but she absolutely nailed a S. Appalacian accent in “Coalminer’s Daughter”.
I would imagine that outsiders probably don’t notice, but here in the South an incorrect Southern accent is immediately apparent.
And Southern dialects can be very finely delineated.
For example, in my state alone, there are 3 broad regions that pronounce the word “water” quite differently: wa-ta, waw-tuh, and wor-ter. (The second is the one you’ll see on TV.)
Get down to the local level and it’s sliced even more finely. Heck, folks in adjoining counties used to make fun of people from my county, because we dropped the final r’s from our words, so that “dollar” became “dolla”.
Personally, one of the few dialects that has completely confounded me over the years is the Liverpool “Low” accent, particularly the early interviews with Ringo Starr.
When I studied broadcasting back in the late '70’s, we took classes in speaking “without an accent”. The textbook was called " A Pronouncing Dictionary of Standard American English" and I was under the distinct impression that Standard American English was a standard used in broadcasting and public speaking. Has that changed?
Ah, Memphis, where my boyfriend had to translate the waitress asking if I’d like a glass of water, and my reply to her, because we were speaking mutually incomprehensible versions of English. That was entertaining.
Sound Mind, I can’t answer your question, but I hope you’ve picked up from this thread that there is no such thing as speaking “without an accent”. If that is what they told you, they were wrong. Any way of speaking has an accent. Whether “Standard American English” is still used at broadcast school or not, it’s still an accent - just not one that’s a local or an ethnic or a cultural one or whatever.
Many people also vastly overestimate how “neutral” their own accent is. When I lived in the Upper Midwest I met people who sounded like characters from Fargo who claimed that Midwesterners “don’t have an accent.” If they would admit to having an accent at all they said it was the standard American accent and claimed that they personally sounded “like the people on TV.”
Since Fargo has been broadcast on television I guess that last part was technically true, but they sure did not sound like MOST of the people on TV to me.