I traveled into english speaking countries a lot of times now and I never had real problems to understand the locals or the other travelers. But there are two exceptions:
I spent three weeks in the english school in Tarrytown NY and met people from nearby all other countries in the world. During my time there I recogniced a huge difference between spanish speakers from spain and spanish speakers from other spanish speaking countries. The guys from Venezuela eg. had one of the best pronounciation I heard over there, whereupon the people from spain were hardly to understand even by native speakers. This spanish accent is very hard to get when they try to speak a little bit faster then spelling. I can't imagine wherefrom this huge difference comes. Maybe the education system is better in Venezuela and in other latin america countries than i spain, or they start earlier with learning english in elementary school. I dont know! I'd be happy to get some comments to that topic.
I had another communication problem during my last weekend trip to Birmingham GB. I'd been in London before and I had no problem understanding the locals there, but this "Birmingham accent" was really terrible. Especially in Wolverhampton, a small city nearby, where I stayed for the weekend visiting a good friend of mine. The airline lost my luggage but they promised me to deliver it the same evening. I wont stay in the accomondation the whole evening to wait for it, because I had just 3 days and I wanted to enjoy my trip. So I decided to ask at the reception of the accomondation if they could recive my luggage like they do with the students parcel-post. I asked the old, angry looking man in the office several times to repeat his answer to my request but me and my friend where both unable to understand one word. After several attempts we finally gave up and went to a pub waiting for the airline to call us when the luggage is gonne be arriving. I don't know if he doesn't want us to understand or if he did not recognice that we weren't able to understand him. Anyway, I enjoyed my weekend there even without my luggage. To complete the story I have to say that I bought a douvet and a tooth-brush in a 24/7 store nearby to survive my first night. The luggage finally arrived on the next afternoon just in time to take it home again!
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
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What a pain about your missing luggage, ugh! About the Spanish speakers, I wouldn't say the difficulty in understanding them is due to level of education. Some languages have many sounds in common and so pronunciation in the second language is not difficult to learn, like German to English, for example. Remember the phonemic chart we have in the classroom? But even though the person from Venezuela and the one from Spain speak the same language, there will be many differences in accent, colloquial phrases, etc. They each contain sounds their friend's language doesn't have so they will come through in English in a different way. It's the same reason you couldn't understand the man from Birmingham's accent. Many of us can't understand Brummies (Birmingham people)! It's a shame that guy was so grumpy. Some people really don't care about intercultural communication and are too lazy to try, I guess.
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