Ahh yes the blanket shit on Americans post.
It’s timeless
A classic
Not sure why their are doing it, could of made fun of anyone.
Make a joke about the British, they’re like “Yeah we do drink a lot of tea did a lot of imperialism, and our food sucks”
Make a joke about the French, and they’re like “ho ho, we are rude and love wine non?”
Make a joke about the Italians, and they’re like “Ay, we do love a pizza, and can’t fight a war!”
Make a joke about Americans, and there’s always the “WHY DO YOU GUYS MAKE FUN OF US! NO FAIR! WHY DO PEOPLE THINK ITS FUNNY TO HATE US?!?”
Only one of these four groups have been dunked on incessantly for years upon years with the same three jokes.
Yeah…it’s the French and capitulating to the Nazis, and they still take it better than Americans and any criticism
Make a joke about Americans being fucking idiots and don’t expect Americans to laugh along. I mean what do you expect? Yeah we drink a lot of coffee and did slavery and use little creamer cups and eat lots of fried food and spend too much on our military. Americans, right? This? No thanks.
its also as if you’re being disingenuous, because try to say that shit to some hardcore right wing patriots of any country and see how fast you get your faced caved in.
I’ve experienced only the opposite. Americans love self deprecating humor but Yuros will literally cry about you “abusing my country” if you say one negative thing.
nailed it
*they’re
*could have
That was the joke.
indeed, I guess I should have added /s or some pointers like >>> here is the joke <<<
the original joke being that it’s seemingly always the Americans that are making the would of/should of/could of mistake
I would of knew itd turn out this way
Blanket 🤔
My 3 favorite experiences with language as an American:
(1) My Jamaican coworker who I couldn’t understand for the life of me and my Ukrainian coworker who my Jamaican couldn’t understand at all, the Ukrainian coworker understood the Jamaican coworker just fine though and I understood my Ukrainian coworker just fine. Basically it turns into a fun game of telephone whenever we need to talk.
(2) My former coworker from Haiti who no one but the hiring manager and I could understand, the best part about this is that I didn’t know he had an accent. I just didn’t hear it somehow. He was a great guy, he went back home a few years ago when his mother passed. Got stuck due to the pandemic and never came back to the company. I hope he’s doing well.
(3) My former coworker from Guatemala insisting English wasn’t my first language as to him it sounded like English was my second language at best. I’ve been working on it since then. I still suck at it.
Americans have trouble with any accent that isn’t the blandest, nails on chalkboard accent.
Once had one ask me if I was speaking English when I spoke to him (for context I am Irish, the north bit)
Lol yeah, it’s just the Americans that don’t understand you. Sure…
Well fucksake mate, when someone asks yous where you’re from, yous go “NornIrn”
Naecunt can unnerstaund thon
Right so don’t really know if this is bait… but that’s one kind of accent (and the tickest pronunciation at that) in ulster, specifically greater Belfast/co. Antrim and very few people speak that thick. For the most part they should be quite understandable from the perspective of anyone who consumes any English language media outside of only American or only London (RP) English. The number of times I have had people have trouble with my accent in Europe and then I ask them what they watched when learning English and the answer is American TV is astounding.
This is me getting on my wee podium now but I have a huge problem with the Americans and Brits for this, they marginalise the fuck out if our dialect, make fun of it for being unitelligible (after making no effort to understand it), and often deny it any legitimacy.
In reality Irish English is spoken by 5-7million people, as large as some dialects of European languages (eg. Austrian/swiss German, Belgian/Swiss French, etc) and if you learn French or German you still get some exposure to those dialects and if you out your mind to it understand it.
I have a huge problem with the Americans and Brits for this, they marginalise the fuck out if our dialect, make fun of it for being unitelligible
I mean I know you’re talking about the wider world and not just this thread, but you started the conversation by being disingenuous about Americans and their dialects. It’s kind of hard for people to take “I have a legitimate dialect” seriously when you just got done trashing half a continent’s worth of dialects
Maybe if we all broach the topic with a little more understanding, you and everyone will feel better about it. For example Appalachian English and Northern Ireland English are both dialects with their own rules of pronunciation and grammar. They’re both legitimate. But it’s not surprising they’d have trouble understanding each other because they have so little interaction. But with patience and mutual respect it can happen
Most German speakers make fun of how unintelligible the Austrian German dialect is. It’s so bad sometimes that translators are required.
As a native german speaker I have to say swiss german is unintelligible gibberish.
You just also seem to have a problem of marginalizing US English and UK English. They vary drastically. Just like how you just stated accents in your own country can vary.
asks yous
Before I read the rest of your comment, I thought you were going for a New York accent.
Bland and nails on chalkboard? That’s like the opposite of bland. Not great, but definitely not bland. Bland is blunt and flat. Nails on chalkboard is shrill, sharp, and grating. I just don’t understand how you can believe both at the same time.
Here, I mean more the reaction to it, I sometimes cringe at the pronunciation or intonation in the way one would to nails on a chalkboard (the idiom can have more than one meaning or reaction attached to it)
That doesn’t change the argument. Bland and cringe are also not like each other. I’m all for you criticizing something because it’s different than you, but at least use your language consistently and properly. How would anyone interpret a secondary analogy without knowing how you personally react? It already has a clear meaning on its surface. Occam’s razor would indicate that’s enough. Why would anyone invent a second possible scenario that’s only knowable if you have access to information that isn’t well known, and in this case, near certainty of being unknown? Just say hearing the accent from some other country makes you cringe. Communication doesn’t have to be difficult unless you make it so.
I am dating a man from England and it’s amazing how many people don’t understand his accent. It might just be me getting to know him, but I don’t find his accent (or even tough accents like Irish or Scottish) hard to understand anymore.
I mean if you never leave the US (easy to do, it’s gigantic and travel is expensive), it’s kinda understandable that you’d struggle with accents because you rarely hear any, let alone other languages. I know americans that have trouble with english accents lmao
Um, plenty of Europeans speak 3 or more languages. Native language, language of the country you’re living in, and English.
German, Bavarian and English 😁
Bavarian
On that note, I also understand some Swabian, Franconian, and Austrian.
Removed by mod
This. I think european and asian should be swapped in this meme. I think its rarer to see asian speak 3 languages than seeing european speak 3 languages
Surely that depends on where in Asia you’re looking at as well? On average, the number of languages people speak is quite different between, say, India and Japan. Or Switzerland vs Romania in Europe.
Meh I only speak English and Norwegian. I can (with extreme difficulty) make myself understood in German, but I wouldn’t say I “speak German” . Although anyone who speaks Norwegian can also understand Swedish and Danish (not easily in the case of Danish unless it’s written).
As an asian, this has been my experience as well. Of course there are exceptions, but most asians I know (not just in my country) usually just speak 2 languages.
But which part of Asia are you from? Here in India, schools are required (at least on paper) to teach three languages, so most people are at least trilingual.
Well yes but many schools teach sanskrit and its a dead language?
Sanskrit is still spoken in some parts of Karnataka state. Also, only some schools run by the federal government teach Sanskrit. Usually it is (1) the official language of the state, (2) English and (3) Hindi. (If Hindi is the official language of the state, then any other Indian language, or a foreigh language, would be offered. For historical reasons most schools in Tamil Nadu state do not offer Hindi, but will have another third language such as French.)
I think it also really depends where you are, which is why generalising entire continents maybe isn’t very useful. Someone from Luxemburg or somewhere in the Netherlands with more recent immigrants is going to be a lot more likely to speak multiple languages than say someone from Russia or more rural France, just as someone from China is more often going to be monolingual compared to someone from India or Singapore
Speak for yourselves. As a Latino born from Mexican immigrants, I speak English and Spanish poorly 😢
You are
Your
🤣
There, their, they’re.
Though through thought
have/of
of/off
to/too
ad/add
I today saw someone use “theirs” in place of “there is”, and I hope that they are a non-native speaker.
American here, I’m going to challenge myself to remember as many as I can.
Set: A group of things that go together.
Set: Letting a dessert cool in the fridge
Set: A stage for a play or film
Set: A command to put something somewhere
Set: A part of Tennis
…
5/704 isn’t so bad, right?
Edit: looking up the definitions shows a lot of sub-definitions that essentially have the same meaning. I don’t think it’s appropriate to say that the word has 435 meanings when “set a course” and “set a fire” are basically “start a thing,” yet they’re listed as different definitions. The are many many of these cases even just on Google’s definition blurb.
But I’m no dictionary expert so…
Yeah some do seem the same, but thats possilbe also a bias from knowning the language.
You mean y’all. Don’t embarrass us.
y’all’d’nt’ve’d’d’i’d’nt’ve’d’y’all’t’ve’d
Here’s one: it’s/its
Now tell me which is possessive.
Well, as an Indian with a love for anime, I speak 3 languages and am learning a 4th (Japanese).
मुळात माझी मातृभाषा मराठी आहे. आणि मी बरीच वर्ष महाराष्ट्रातच राहिलीय…
लेकिन school और दोस्तों के वजह से हिंदी भी बोल लेता है. और तो और, इन दोनो की लिपी एक जैसी ही होने के कारण पढणे मे भी दिक्कत नही आति.
わたしはあにめがすきですから、にほんごをべんきょうおします。今は、にほんごのうりょうくしけんのN5できました。今年の１２月にN4できますよ。
And I plan on learning more soon 🙃.
That’s just one language - the language of funny symbols.
idk they look pretty nice, nicer than English i’d say. they both are different languages but use the same transcript or something?
No u.
Hello fellow Indian. This is very similar to my linguistic capabilities if you substitute Japanese for the bit of French I learnt in school / college 30 years ago. Ok, I can’t really follow someone when they speak French, but I can read it well enough even now.
AYEEEEE wassup bruh.
Does a namaste, then raises hand for high five
Nice. I know every language is pretty difficult mostly, but as someone who’s had a hard time learning Hindi after realising it uses the same script and yet is a different language from Marathi, French just blows my fucking mind.
French just blows my fucking mind.
In my experience, it was reasonably simple to learn how to read / write French. We had it in school for 3 years and then college for a couple of years. The emphasis was on reading / writing and not so much on speaking / listening, though I remember we had to recite some French poetry once. The teacher’s ears must have fallen of hearing our impeccable accents :D
Bonjour, aimez-vous les croissants?
Bonjour, aimez-vous les croissants?
Un peu, mais je prefere les baguettes
(and also I just realized I totally don’t know how to make acute / grave accents on my keyboard, if that’s possible at all with an en-US layout)
Here, you can copy-paste: é è ê ë à â ï î ô ù û ç 😉
This feels like I’m playing No Man’s Sky. Just a bunch of symbols I don’t recognize and then the word “school” in the middle without context hahaha.
In all seriousness, good for you. That’s very impressive. I’m only bilingual with a basic understanding of a third language.
lmao. I feel you.
Thanks man. I’m barely able to read at present…
Also, that’s pretty cool dude! Nice.
Yoo i kinda can understand the jp one lol.
Please use more kanji lol, it feels weird seeing words that are commonly written in kanji in hiragana.
Perfectly acceptable for beginners to write in kana. Many of my students here primarily write in kana until up to 6th grade.
Definitely is. I forgot the actual name of the writing style, but for children’s books it is also not uncommon to have kanji with their hiragana transliteration above/beside it. Requiring someone to immediately write kanji when they learn japanese, especially as a secondary+ language is insane
Furigana I believe
試験を合格しておめでとうございます!🎉N４に頑張って!
ありがとうございます。
日本語のうりょうくしけんがんばってね！ぼくはそのしけんのためにぜんぜんべんきょうしないので、むずかしさわかりません。 もし、日本へりょこうしたいなら、外来語はとっても大切だと思ういますよ。かたかなをよめなければ、何も分かりませんでした。
あ。。。どうもね。 そうですね。。。たいへんですね。。。 ぼくはごいとぶんぽうがとてもへたですよ。。。 かたかなきらいですから、あまりしらないよ。。。
Many indians speak 4+ languages easily , and we dont even notice that 😅
Isn’t India in Asia
Last I checked.
Fun fact: when you say “Asian” to an American, their first thought is East or Southeast Asia, but a British person’s primary association with “Asianness”, for lack of a better term, is India and Pakistan.
I did not know that, interesting.
Do they refer to East Asians as “oriental” then?
Only the very old and/or racist ones do afaik
Wait why? They’re literally in the Orient
We don’t call it that anymore. Haven’t for decades.
As for the why, the time when that term was in regular use was a time with a lot of anti-asian bigotry and most of the people who refuse to stop using it are the same ones who use other outdated terms/slurs for non-white and non-western people, so it has tons of negative connotations…
My mom complained that the ramen she likes isn’t called Oriental anymore.
SIGH
Geographically it is a subcontinent that slammed into Asia to form the Himalayas, so you could make the argument it is its own thing.
That’s like arguing nothing is its own thing cause they used to be one continent.
its not about continent its about himalayas that saparated india and china .
Clearly, this dude voted to become mr. worldwide
India and Pakistan are considered to be in Asia but more accurately they are considered to be in the Indian Subcontinent. The same way Iran, Saudi Arabia and the rest are also considered to be in Asia but they are more accurately considered to be on the Middle East.
SEA PROBABLY , however India , pakistan , sri lanka and bangladesh are considered a subcontinent coz similar cultures , and are different from rest of asia !
Not to take away from this but often these 4 are very similar languages that could be easily interpreted as dialects if not the identity politics.
you could say the same about italian-spanish-french-romanian they still counts as separate languages
Well most indian languages are not even mutually intelligible so idk if its about identity politics or what not !
It is complicated. India has at least four language families - Indo-European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan. So Hindi (I-E) is closer related to English or Greek than to Tamil (Dra), Santali (AA) or Zeme (S-T). While it is rare for people to speak languages belonging to all four families, I know at least three people who can passably speak six languages from two or three families.
How well do you speak those languages? For example, can you order pizza with pineapple and olives in any of those languages? What if the pizza you get is cold, there’s only one olive on it and the crust is soggy, could you get your complaints through in any language?
Or perhaps will the explanation be more like: “Pizza bad, no good. Want money back.”
I’m not from India but as another Asian, yes, we can have fluent conversations in several languages. (I grew up speaking English, Mandarin, Malay, Cantonese and a bit of Hakka)
Found the Malaysian
Hello! 👋 We’re mostly on monyet.cc on Lemmy.
That’s pretty cool. Took a quick look at the relationships those languages have, and it seems that Malay is the odd one out, all the others are in the sinitic family. I would expect that if you learn one, your mind isn’t going to explode if you try to learn the other two. However, Malay is completely different, so jumping into that world may require some extra effort.
To give a European example, if you already know Norwegian, learning Swedish it’s only one step away. Jumping into Danish or German at that point can be done, but it will require some extra effort. A similar situation exists between Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
It’s more to do with my multicultural upbringing - Malay is the national language here in Malaysia, so it’s pretty much compulsory to learn & speak. My parents are Cantonese & Hakka Chinese, I learnt to speak Malay & Mandarin in school (where ethnic Chinese kids from different dialect groups as well as ppl from other ethnicities mingle), and spoke mostly English in college & work. We also have Indians and other minorities who speak even more dialects/languages than I do.
Well most of us speak a mother tongue , and english ( since ex britt colony ) very fluently , but there are times when both parents speak a different language and the city /state you live in has a different language and hence they speak it very close to native fluency !
My bf and his family for instance speaks 6 languages for the reasons listed above !
The only good thing that the Americanization brought is, that, except the French, the world can communicate with each other in English.
Even if the French could communicate in English, would anyone want to have a conversation with a Frenchman?
Non
I know you are joking but based on my purely anecdotal personal experience, the French (at least in Paris) can now speak and are willing to speak in English much more than a few decades back.
The first time I went to France, almost 25 years back, I had a rough time communicating at restaurants or even buying tickets at the Paris metro stations. Not sure if the latter was an ability or willingness issue because even holding up two fingers and saying “two tickets” was apparently indecipherable. Had to muster my school days French and say “deux billets” to produce instant results.
Edit: And no, the two fingers I was holding up were not the middle finger of each hand :P
it’s like the one upside(ish) of capitalism they had to start communicating in English, because tourism.
That is the one upside to capitalism and you don’t even consider it a full upside?
As an island monkey, I’m hurt by this comment. Y U no love UK?
We also normalized porn
You’re welcome, degens.
Porn was legalized for the first time in Denmark 1967, so not really.
Good thing that’s a different word then
Some of my collegemates know 6 languages(India)
South and Southeast Asians really put all their xp into languages
They will speak hindi, their native and 3 neighboring states’ languages fluently and then complain about north Indian hindi oppression
(which is definitely a thing but I have my own different views on it not expressed in this comment or comparison)
India is basically a language generator
Haha
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Oh look, it’s the same old reposted garbage meme that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
Oh look, it’s the same old reposted garbage comment that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
Oh look, it’s the same old comment complaining about another comment that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
Oh look, it’s the same old reposted comment chain that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
idk I’ve seen this first time, and its hilarious, though agreed I never used Reddit that much
This has been reposted on the dankmemes subreddit a countless amount of times.
Include anglo Canadians in there too!
Complaining about bilingual (english + french) positions in the public service is a favorite hobby of anglo public servants, as if the french ones didn’t need to learn a second language to get the job… Heck, it’s not rare to see/hear one argue that french Canadians should just start speaking english and stop bothering them about their “unique culture”…
But hey, it’s not racism… Or so they say 🤷
I can confirm this, in high school (Québec) no one really gives a f**k about learning English as they don’t need it if they stay in Québec and don’t understand that knowing English is a valuable asset.
Speaking French isn’t a race.
Racism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
Racism is discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity.
Ethnicity: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnicity
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, society, nation, religion, or social treatment within their residing area
Guess that answers the question, you’re wrong :)
So the genocide in Rwanda wasn’t racism? Interesting.
面白いね。メキシコがアメリカの近くにあるのに、アメリカの大分がスペイン語を全然はなせないねｗ！私もスペイン語が習いたいけど、日本語もうＰａｉｎｉｎｔｈｅａｓｓだよ！
I understood “pain in the ass”, did I pass the test?
I actually didn’t understand that part lol… Took me two times to get it
日本語難しいね。。。
There are few reasons to visit Mexico for most Americans, even those on the border. If you don’t understand that, then you’re ignorant of how things typically work here. I live there (in a border city), feel free to ask me questions.
This said, I agree that japanese is a pain in the ass to learn. Still, I’m really enjoying the process of it. I’m done with Hiragana, and I’m learning Katakana now. So, I’m a the level of a child, basically… But that’s okay. We all have to start somewhere, and judging strangers is kind of considered an asshole move here in America.
Good luck with your learnings.
I assume in terms of incentive, there are more reason for Spanish speakers to learn English than English speakers to learn Spanish. Likewise most Spanish speakers within the US tend to keep to their own communities, and you’re unlikely to directly interact with them unless you are friends with people in the group, or frequently do business with people who speak Spanish.
It’s kinda like Russian and its bordering Countries. Many people in Kazakhstan can speak Russian, but not many Russians can speak Kazakh.
And good luck with your language endeavors as well. Japanese does get easier the more you interact with it. I am at the top of my game when I’m watching and reading media constantly.
Many Americans actually are bilingual or are studying another language to become bilingual.
But Americans be like duhhhhh hahaha stereotypes
Some perspective is worthwhile here. It’s 21% of americans vs 65% of Europeans.
German here, speaking english fluently, enough french to get everything done while on vacation in France or Wallony and learning Japanese atm.
I’m also learning Japanese! How do you feel about it so far?
I’m enjoying it, but the sheer number of Kanji are quite intimidating to think about…
Wait till you discover the wonderful world of the pitch accent!
I’m using duolingo and am almost done with the first big section. It is so different compared to germanic and latin languages! But that was one of the reasons to learn it, so kinda expected. I’m also enjoying it, I don’t worry so much about reading and writing and focus on speaking and understanding, like a child would do. Reading and writing is the next step and I hope that it comes somewhat naturally this way.
