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Broken English, is it offensive to you? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| MarcoLeal Groupie Portugal Joined 4835 days ago 58 posts - 104 votes  Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 57 of 83 15 March 2013 at 4:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Up to now, this topic has been mostly debated by native English Speakers, and mostly concerned English but I think we could easily broaden it.
Am I ever offended if someone doesn't speak language X well? Provided they aren't rude, don't use double standards, etc, no, I'm never offended. However, I do feel a slight annoyance when people speak a language below the standard that would be expected of them, considering both the opportunities and the motives they had to learn it. Of course the level of annoyance depends on the level of mismatch. In other words, it's not a matter of fluency, it's a matter of commitment. Extreme cases include: - People my age (mid-twenties) who have at least finished high-school (which means they have studied English at school for about 7 years), often go on to college, live in a coutry where exposure to English speaking media is significant (as is the case here in Portugal, due to how popular american entertainment is) and despite that can barely build a grammatically correct sentence. - People who have lived for years in a foreign country and are capable of little more than Hello/Goodbye/Thank you and not even because they truly understand what they're saying but because they've been told they should produce a certain set of sounds in those situations. That said, I do feel annoyed by languages (and not specifically people) that to my hears are, in themselves, butchered versions and weird mixtures of other languages. Prime examples would be Singlish and Manglish. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4370 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 58 of 83 17 March 2013 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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"Broken" (oral) English doesn't really offend me, but I do become frustrated when I have a difficult time understanding even after repeating/asking for clarification in a professional setting. I'm pretty sure that my law school required all of its non-native English speakers to have a high level on the TOEFL (or whatever test it required), and I'm sure that all of the students in that category did indeed have high scores. But I can think of several students who clearly were not able to write at that high of a level, and in listening to them answering questions, sometimes it was genuinely difficult to understand the argument being made. That said, they all passed the Bar on the first try, and can undoubtedly handle working with clients, asking the right questions, and explaining what needs to be done. But drafting a Will or a contract? I don't know, I think in a language-based profession it's not out of line to expect a certain level among practitioners who graduate from English-speaking schools.
That said, the mistakes made by learners don't bother me nearly as much as the ones made by native speakers. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bubblyworld Newbie South Africa http:/ Joined 4287 days ago 7 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Xhosa, French, Japanese | Message 59 of 83 18 March 2013 at 8:01am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't generally get upset or irritated by broken English. I know how hard English is to learn, so usually I find it's easier to just accept it and try to help out when the speaker has difficulty getting across an idea. I admit though, sometimes I just nod and reply in the affirmative if I'm really struggling to understand, hehe.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zerrubabbel Senior Member United States Joined 4601 days ago 232 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 60 of 83 18 March 2013 at 10:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I realize this topic is quite far along, but here are my thoughts.
Those of us who come together on the internet and share our experiences, our successes, and our failures tend to enjoy benefits that make language learning less of a task for us. Most of us agree that classes typically arent the best solution for learning, and aside from that, we explore what style of learning we prefer, talking from day one, or dividing into passive and active phases etc. This is just one example, but your average person in the world might not be aware of this. I love the Pimsleur programs because it very quickly helps me to simply understand the grammar of a language, without the worry of applying rules. I think there are several situations like this where the average person would be just left to do it the hard way. So Im in favor of giving the benefit of the doubt, and leaving the feeling of offense for some other topic. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 61 of 83 19 March 2013 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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No, not offensive to me. I have never believed English to be an especially easy language to learn for those who do not grow up speaking it, and the spelling system can bewilder even native speakers. Someone half-seriously suggested that the world's international language was "bad English". Even the Dutch, reputedly very good L2 speakers of English, make enough comical mistakes for entire books to be written about the errors in their English.
To add a further comment to the above: Chicherin, a Soviet foreign minister, was a polyglot whose English was sometimes "delightfully wrong", according to the US journalist and author Louis Fischer who knew him. Fischer once asked for an appointment to see him, and Chicherin sent back a note in English to say that it was not possible right away. The exact words he used? "I am at present invisible." Edited by William Camden on 19 March 2013 at 5:33pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Rajsinhasan Diglot Newbie Joined 4699 days ago 24 posts - 34 votes Speaks: English*, Creole (English) Studies: Portuguese | Message 62 of 83 22 March 2013 at 6:42am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't find broken English offensive at all as long as it's an additional tongue of a
foreign language learner who is putting forth effort in acquiring it. I would only be offended if I somehow knew that the person speaking broken English were in an English speaking environment for years and feels quite content at the level of fluency their at; then again, depending on what language base their coming from, I'd be more sympathetic. What I do find truly offensive are when Creole languages are referred to as bad English when they're truly languages in their own right with their own grammar and history; although this can be said of all creoles no matter the language base. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 63 of 83 22 March 2013 at 11:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah. Or when some dialects (especially African American) are called bad English.
I'm absolutely not offended by bad Russian, although I wish some learners looked things up more often when writing. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4623 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 64 of 83 22 March 2013 at 1:19pm | IP Logged | ||
Good shout! For many years, the Scots dialect was considered by some people to be "bad English". Sad really, because it has a long tradition of poetry, literature and song. I once read somewhere that African American actually has more verb tenses than standard English. I don't know if this is true, but classing a language which has diverged in complexity as "broken" or "bad" doesn't make sense. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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