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A comment on How Africans Are Changing French – One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time. Parent comment

Re:How Africans Are Changing French – One Joke, Rap and Book... by marcus_holmes on Monday December 18, 2023 @12:26AM (#38679519)
In Germany they were happy to see me trying, but almost universally couldn't understand any of my garbled sentences. I put it down to German being one of those languages where the order of words matters less and conjugation matters more for inferring context (and context is key to making any sense). Because I mis-conjugated a lot, it came across as garbled nonsense.

I've travelled a bit, and learning to speak Global English is definitely a skill. My German wife is more understandable to the average SE Asian than I am, despite me being a native speaker. She uses less $5 words, and simpler sentence construction than I do. It's interesting (and a little galling) seeing my perfectly-constructed sentence fail to make any headway, while her simple English is immediately understood.

And yes, at times I've definitely reacted with "I understood that, but holy crap that was bad English". Whatever works I guess.

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Re:How Africans Are Changing French – One Joke, Rap and Book... by carstenhag on Monday December 18, 2023 @02:35AM (#38680070)
Haha, it's funny we have had similar experiences. But I have been the German in this situation. We had some designers from the UK and often out team members were struggling to understand them, and I had to reiterate their sentences in other terms, sometimes in bad English but that everyone understood. (A large part is also the British accent)
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Re:How Africans Are Changing French – One Joke, Rap and Book... by hnbad on Monday December 18, 2023 @03:19AM (#38680255)
The fun thing about those experiences in professional settings is that the non-native speakers struggling with $5 words will liberally use $10 words ($50 words? I don't know how this is deals with inflation) that are part of the specific domain.
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Re:How Africans Are Changing French – One Joke, Rap and Book... by notahacker on Monday December 18, 2023 @06:33AM (#38681276)
And trying to communicate clearly English to someone considerably more fluent in a Latin-derived language can even be an exercise in picking $10 and $50 words over the standard $5 ones because so much of our fancy vocabulary has common Latin roots
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