Why do non-native speakers overrate their English so much?
Being a great fan of Schadenfreude, I take pleasure in intentionally making my English difficult to understand for non-natives. I speak as fast as possible, accentuate my native accent and use complicated words and slang in equal measure. I make numerous Anglo-Saxon cultural references (the kind you don't really understand unless your childhood was in English). I use puns religiously and occasionally burst into laughter for no reason, and watch gleefully as the Globish speakers look confusedly at one another, trying to understand where the joke was.
So next time you're sitting in an excruciatingly boring meeting with a bunch of stiff foreigners in suits, lighten things up a little for yourself.
saz
It seems you are a very interesting interlocutor!
I would like to be confronted with native english at its best!
Though since you seem to rest on your background a lot in doing so (as you wrote above), I wonder how you will adapt
when Globish/Newspeak is overrun by Cityspeak!
Being a great fan of Schadenfreude, I take pleasure in intentionally making my English difficult to understand for non-natives. I speak as fast as possible, accentuate my native accent and use complicated words and slang in equal measure. I make numerous Anglo-Saxon cultural references (the kind you don't really understand unless your childhood was in English). I use puns religiously and occasionally burst into laughter for no reason, and watch gleefully as the Globish speakers look confusedly at one another, trying to understand where the joke was.
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You can do that, but they will still speak globish, and you will be alone.
Do you understand what is "a language for communication"? people have already a mother tongue, they only need english to do business or to speak with foreigner who don't speak their language. So, if globish is enough, they will stay with globish, human are naturally lazy, they always choose the easy stuff. And globish speaker outnumber (think of all this chinese people ,etc...) the native speaker. Globish is already there. You can do nothing to stop it.
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Why wouldn Anglophones not cling to their original language? It seems rather arrogant to assume that a native speaker should "dumb down" their language just to accommodate non-native speakers who overrate their English abilities. English is not so easy as a lot of people might think.
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Two comments:
In my Polish class, one of the students who is quite good at Polish, will sometimes ask the teacher, who is quite good in English: What is the 'blasted' something?
Personally, I think that is really being unhelpful and unkind. You are trying to understand a foreign language, and someone throws in a completely unnecessary word for effect!
Second comment:
In every language, people adjust what they say, and how they say it, to who they are talking to. I know I am stating the obvious. You would not use technical terms when talking to a child.
I suppose I should add that a lot of British people talk to foreigners as if they are children - using painfully stupid expressions.
But what I meant to say, is that in Scotland, because I am obviously English, people will say - 'Mince and potatoes' rather than 'Mince and tatties'. So, they are making allowances.
I was in Portsoy, at the boat festival and I bought a kipper and oatcakes at an open air stall. The person selling this delicacy thought that I had never come across such authentic Scottish food before. People have all sorts of weird ideas and prejudices.
I myself tend to not do such at all, but rather speak to non-native English-speakers I know have not been in this part of the US for long in a moderate-to-high-register form of my native dialect, and speak to non-native English speakers who have lived here a while like everyone else who is from the US who is not specifically from this part of the Upper Midwest. And most non-native English-speakers who have lived a good while in the Upper Midwest who I have spoken to have not had trouble with how I speak, even though I have run into non-native English-speakers who "should" be at least relatively competent with in English who have had severe problems understanding even my formal speech.
Travis, I have just tried to read what you have written and it is almost indecipherable.
"I myself tend to not do such at all" : Quite a mouthful to start off with.
Have you ever read 'The Sun' guide to writing good English?
1 Short Sentences
2 Grammar Check with Wordprocessor
3 etc. etc. ....
Perfect Written English: All You Need to Get It Right First Time
(Perfect series) (Paperback)
by Chris West (Author)
Good English, Oral and Written, Book One (Paperback)
by William Harris Elson (Author)
List Price: $20.99
LOLOLOL! Robin Michael! Have you ever thought there might be something wrong with YOU?
>>"I myself tend to not do such at all" : Quite a mouthful to start off with.<<
I could have said "I do not such" instead, yes, had I favored terseness over expressiveness.
>>Have you ever read 'The Sun' guide to writing good English?<<
No, I have not myself. Note that (non-academic) magazines and newspapers are written with the assumption of a 6th grade reading level and little in the way of an attention span, limitations which I often find to be highly restrictive in practice.
>>1 Short Sentences<<
I do have a tendency to favor more complex sentence structures with multiple cascading clauses and heavy usage adverbial forms simply because it is often easier to express complex ideas that way. When such are broken up, they generally require extra empty words to be added to link the parts together, parts which themselves do not clearly express the overall intent thereof. While the individual sentences are shorter and simpler, the whole is longer, more unwieldy, and more discontinuous, and must be pieced together to be understood.
>>2 Grammar Check with Wordprocessor<<
Just so you know, grammar checkers are practically useless, and will very often reject very grammatical forms, only accepting highly restricted forms in practice. As I tend to favor overall flexibility in using a wide range of (often rather intricate) English syntactic forms in writing, using a grammar checker would only limit my writing to more rigid forms.
I don't like when they pronounce IRON wrongly, as [ai-ron] that is, or OF as [of]...Or when they use [x] instead of [h] (as in ''have, hospital'')...
I'm not a native speaker. I perfectly understand everything Travis writes (except IPA stuff), even if I have to lookup a word or two on occasion; simply because his thoughts are exposed with clarity...which is more than I can say...
(I don't even know why I'm writing this, whole situation is actually comical).
*...hmm...I must have a crush on Travis...his intellect anyway...or his moral posture(?)...whatever...*
I don't like .... when they use [x] instead of [h] (as in ''have, hospital'')...
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aww, I like it.
Plain English please?
"multiple cascading clauses"
This Forum is for people learning English as a foreign language. So, I would have thought that simple English was preferable to complex English.
A lot of academics are very clever people. Some are not as clever as they think they are. Some write a lot of indecipherable rubbish, that is not properly thought through.
I am not criticising a particular person. I am just making the point that sometimes the best writing is simple.
Winston churchill "finest hour"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsKDGM5KTBY
, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender
http://www.fiftiesweb.com/usa/winston-churchill-fight-beaches.htm