Have you ever met a person from another English-speaking country, and you couldn't understand

their speech?

I met an Englishman once and everything he said, his comrade had to repeat it, because I couldn't understand him.

Couldn't follow him one bit.

be able to understand someone from MN, dontcha know, dere? ;)

..some Southerners, sometimes Afrian-American colloquialisms.

so it all sounds clearer to me now.

that I have run into.

While I am sure there are people whom I don't understand, the most I've ever had to do so far was acclimate myself to their speech patterns after a few minutes.

They just want us to think it's English as they laugh behind our backs. Some Indian people too.

i have a very unusual accent tho -- and if they really can't understand it's usually because their english is a 2nd or 3rd language

on the other side of it, it has been a while since i met a londoner that i truly couldn't understand what was being said if i focused

i don't necessarily understand creole english, i've eavesdropped on conversations between belizeans or jamaicans where i couldn't understand what was being discussed but i'm not sure if that wasn't intentional because when i was myself addressed they suddenly had much clearer easier to understand accents

how much is really an accent and how much is really the special vocabulary of an in group?

from a classmate of mine from Cape Cod. He pronounced it like "fahklah" it turned out he was saying "folklore"

At first I had to literally concentrate to understand him. After a while it got to where I didnt notice.

:hi:

Appallingly enough, the only intelligible word in his long spiel was the N-word.

I asked him to please repeat himself with the same results. :P

And in Jamaica, I had a problem because when they speak to each other, it's another language altogether.

they speak English, but very quickly! I had a very hard time understanding a friend from there, unless he slowed his speech down for me.

are two people divided by a common language?

When we first moved to this house, the couple next door
were older folks who had been here since they built the
neighborhood back after WWII. Nice folks in their 80s.

The husband used a wheelchair to get around, although his legs worked,
and the stuff that came out of his mouth sounded to me like
a cartoon Frenchman choking on a cotton ball.

I (incorrectly) assumed that he was a brain-damaged stroke survivor,
and I basically just smiled and nodded along whenever he talked to me
for the first three years we lived here.

But one day, I had an epiphany.

I was in our backyard, and he and his wife were in theirs
working on their various garden areas...
when he rolled up behind me and caught me by surprise,
saying "Dih...ahYAH ennay goowit unammah?"

His wife wasn't close by for me to look to for help,
so I just said "sorry?" as though I hadn't heard him, to stall for time...
and he repeated: "Dih..ahYAH ennay goowit unammah?"

I was about to say "sorry?" again, when I noticed what he had in his hands:
In one hand, he was holding the handle and head of the small garden rake
he regularly used in his veggie garden- they were no longer attached to each other.
In the other hand, he had a claw hammer and a short nail.

And like a bolt of lightning, it dawned on me- he didn't have brain damage,
he just had a TREMENDOUSLY thick NorthCarolina accent!

I was hearing "Dih..ahYAH ennay goowit unammah?",
when he was asking "Dick- are y'all any good with a hammer?"

From that day forth, I understood EVERY word he said!

I told him a nail wasn't the best way to fix it, so he rolled
over into his outbuilding to find a short screw while I used the tiniest
screwdriver blade on my Leatherman tool to ream a pilot hole in
his rake handle. He found a screw that was PERFECT for the job,
and I put his rake back together better than new.

Once I understood him, we talked alot more, and I eventually found out
that he had been a career Air Force mechanic, until an on-the-job
accident had almost killed him in the late Sixties. He had suffered a
serious head injury, and was in a coma for a while, but surprised
everyone by making a full recovery.

Almost full- his brain was fine, but he was left without his sense of BALANCE.
That's why he was "flintstoning" himself all around in the wheelchair.

He said he had used crutches to get around for 20 years or so, and had gotten
pretty good with them, but crutches were hard work, and after he hit 70
he really preferred the chair.

He said he fell down a few times back in the 70's when he was using crutches,
and that was embarrassing...but he never once had a wheelchair that just
flopped onto its side the moment he stopped paying attention to it! :)

He could understand me, but I couldn't get a handle on his accent.