Well exposure to different accents can make you understand these kind of things.
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over_clox@lemmy.world 1 week agoHonestly I haven’t studied foreign languages all that much, but I’ve heard the accents that come from a variety of regions and countries.
The last time I got confused about anything spoken in English by an Indian man, I mistook ‘tiles’ as ‘towels’.
I totally lost out on a tile installation job offer over that, because of a misunderstanding over what’s basically the pronunciation of a particular vowel.
Like, in the back of my head, I’m wondering why this hotel owner is telling me he’s updating his towels, when really he said tiles. He was offering me a job…
I didn’t find out until he got others to do all the work ☹️
Vowels can be extremely important in communication…
Microw@lemm.ee 1 week ago
idiomaddict@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’m from Connecticut and once had a serious problem with a person my company insured from North Carolina. He was talking to me about what caused his accent and I kept hearing “tar” instead of “tire.” We were equally qualified as native speakers.
If you’re concerned, you can listen to more Indian English, because familiarity should ease any understanding difficulties in the future.
over_clox@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I had already spent years doing occasional side work with around a dozen if not more folks originally from India. Most, except the oldest of the elders spoke good if not excellent English. But there’s pretty much always gonna be at least a subtle accent, if not a heavy accent with secondary languages.
I thought I understood the fella clearly, but it was both a combination of his accent plus the strange sentence structure context that threw me totally off.
He said he was ‘updating his tiles’, but I misunderstood his vowels, so I heard ‘updating his towels’
And why the hell would he use the word updating, he was literally having all the carpet removed in 44+ rooms and having tiles installed, not ‘updated’.
So even the context clues didn’t add up, I never guessed he was talking about the tile work he had been planning for months.
idiomaddict@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Sometimes it’s a second (or fifth) language for Indian people, but it’s also a dialect which is just as valid as your dialect and it’s got the second most English speakers in the world. The accent may just be an accent, you definitely shouldn’t assume that it’s a sign someone will have incorrect English.