Re:Finnish as a world language?
by notahacker on Friday August 26, 2022 @03:17PM
(#32611589)
Tolerance of different pronunciations is helpful for people learning to speak English, but not so much for following what they're saying. Plus of course we have a significant number of words where an attempted phonetic pronunciation might not be a bit unusual so much as completely unintelligible.
At least we're not that fussy about stress and apart from implied questions don't really convey much important meaning with tone.
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I don't know about you, but I have a very hard time understanding a lot of Indian accents specifically because of the unfamiliar stress patterns. (That, and their avoidance of aspirated consonants, which drives me crazy.)
Re:Finnish as a world language?
by notahacker on Friday August 26, 2022 @07:05PM
(#32613766)
tbh I find the unfamiliar stress patterns of reasonably fluent Indian English speakers a lot less problematic than some of the quirks my fellow Brits' stronger regional accents! The tendency to enunciate syllables we often mash together actually tends to be clearer
Re:Finnish as a world language?
by BuckRogers on Friday August 26, 2022 @11:20PM
(#32615308)
Yeah I do decent with Indian accents as well. And I have more trouble with Chinese accents and many British accents. But I mostly can’t stand the southern English and their inability to pronounce the letter R. It sounds like someone with a speech impediment. As an American I greatly prefer speaking to a Scot or Irishman.
And the closer you get to London the more the English have a French culture. By that I mean an inferiority/superiority complex. They’re always better than everyone else.