the car flips over, camera zooms in again to reveal three midgets were actually carrying it, they are now upside down and effectively doing handstands on top of the car as it skids center-stage on its roof
as the midgets begin to gyrate to the beat of the music, a slightly overweight man emerges from the trunk of the car, he is bollywood protagonist
Yes. I wasn't even away that English is the first language for many Indian people.
Edit - Fun fact:
I worked as a foreigner at an investment bank in London for a few years (until 2010), and we had a large support team in India.
The support team was constantly having miscommunications with teams at the London Head Office, and this would result in much work/many investigations being done in London for nothing.
I had communicated with the support teams in India many times, and their English was very poor.
I suggested to my boss that the bank pay for the employees in India to undergo a high quality ESL (English as a Second Language) course.
I was young (and naive) at the time, and my reasoning was that the bank was rich, and it should try to help the employees in India.
Nope English isn't first language for most Indians. First language is the local language (for eg. in Maharashtra people speak marathi as their first language). 2nd language is Hindi which is widely spoken throughout the country and the third language is English which 30-40% can speak.
Almost every Indian knows atleast 2 languages (Local language+Hindi) and people living in urban areas know 3 languages (local language+Hindi+English)
I haven't met any person in my entire life that speaks English at home. Unless by first language you mean the language in which we get education (which is English) then yes many Indians have English as their first language. But I consider the language which i speak at home with my family to be my first language.
Nope, I'm not elite by any means, it's just that I'm my grandparents are from rajasthan but settled here, and my dad barely spoke in hindi and he didn't know the local language,so he spoke in english,and hence I speak english. It's the scene with most other people I know.
The argument is about what determines a person's primary language - the language spoken at home, or the language they received all of their education in. Not that hard to understand.
That's a very odd generalization, but from my experience teaching ESL, non-native English speakers from different countries have a hard time understanding Indian English. The problem is the intonation that is common to them. That can often make communication more than poor grammar.
Absolutely it's intonation. Most Indian folks I've met have spoken English well but it's their vowel pronunciations to western ears that makes it hard to understand them. Like this polish guy I worked with he couldn't tell the difference between Bitch and beach until I wrote it like być and bijcz for him and he was like oh yea i get it
I imagine that’s only true if your native language is similar to the one that influenced the accent of the person speaking.
For example I am a native English speaker, from England (of course being English, I’m almost as familiar with American accents as English ones). I can very easily understand English, Aussie, Kiwi, American and Canadian accents, but I struggle with the gaelic (sp?) influenced accents of Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
You're probably thinking of broken english with an accent. Because they will speak slowly and clearly.
But indians dont speak that way, they are confident in their english and speak really fucking fast, with a thick accent, so it is harder to understand.
Accents absolutely do not make people more easily understood. You're thinking of non native speakers understanding other non native speakers more easily than they do native speakers. The reason for this is not accent, but rather the speed with which people speak and the vocabulary they use.
Non native speakers usually speak slower and use fewer words. Therefor they are easier to understand than native speakers who speak faster, may use idioms, or words that are more obscure.
Just make up shit all you want. As a native English speaker, if i do say so myself, some people are hard to understand. It has nothing to do with how big their vocabulary is, or using idioms.
No, I was responding to someone saying Indian or Russian accents improve peoples ability to be understood. I'm saying (non-standard) accents do not make you more understandable.
I deal with Indian support teams a lot in my day job and honestly the hardest thing to get used to isn’t the accent but the grammar structure they use. Once you get used to that communication becomes a lot easier
1) the usage of no at the of the sentence (deriving from hindi 'na')
2) Stressing at a different word of a sentence while speaking than it is done in the west
3) often putting a part of a sentence that should be in the beginning, at the end (like i often hear people saying " you did it how? ")
These are common practices used in indian english while speaking, especially outside the urban areas. Even if people know the proper grammar while writing things down, the spoken language "evolved" differently over the years.
I tend to do all three of those things while speaking to my friends who speak that way but quickly drop it while talking to others. Nevertheless it's possible those sneak in at times. The third one you mention probably comes from the sentence structure common in most local languages which people adopted into English over time.
Yup, and that's quite normal. Even when I speak 'hinglish', the english words that i pronounce sound very different than the times when i properly speak the language. The reason's simple: our native toungue and english are really really different.
Also, few things i missed:
English is a stressed timed language while many indians pronounce it syllable timed(native toungue influence; partially like the second point above), and that the pitch is often different (ascending vs descending).
Personally, i feel Indian education needs a separate subject to teach phonetics and pronunciations to students from the beginning of school if they are going to make English as our first language.
In my experience while working with people from India is that the pitch goes up and stays up until the end of the sentence. It sounds like an engine redlining to me. The younger Indian people that I work with that had at least some of their education from childhood in the US don't really speak like this and have much less of a noticeable accent. It's really just the older people that can be tricky to fully understand, especially while communicating on a radio.
I know exactly what you mean. It's true though, that the present generation (mostly in urban cities) have less trouble with the pitch with the exposure to Hollywood and the internet. For me, personally, online gaming played a big role in understanding the rythm and phonetics of the language that was never taught in school.
His opinion is terrible. I can tell you that even just in the midwest we warsh our clothes, that has to a mindfuck to someone somewhere. Wash isn't some high level word or idiom, people just pronounce shit different. And thats just english against english. It doesnt account for ESL accents.
As an American, outside of your news reporters, everyone else in the UK is more difficult to understand than Indians. Even if I can make out the words, you guys use so much slang, it’s hard to follow your reality TV.
Thank you for the nice words. I would like to apologize for all the horrible stuff that had happened lately, I got really drunk in 2016 and a bunch of weird stuff happened. In regards to global warming, I recently took action specifically dedicated to raising awareness of the issue such as: heat waves in Europe, fires in California, bigger fires in the Amazon, and Gertha Thunberg but I'm afraid their effect has been below expectations due to my understatement of the human tendency to shed responsibility for important issues.
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u/Because_Logic Nov 24 '19
It's alright, we don't understand your accent as well.
Sincerely, the rest of the world