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Most surprised reaction from natives? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| COF Senior Member United States Joined 5642 days ago 262 posts - 354 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 91 16 May 2012 at 12:16am | IP Logged |
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Obviously, no one bats an eyelid at a foreigner speaking French or Spanish, etc, but which language have you found results in the most suprise from native speakers when you speak it as a second language speaker?
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| Ellsworth Senior Member United States Joined 4768 days ago 345 posts - 528 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Irish | Message 2 of 91 16 May 2012 at 12:31am | IP Logged |
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OMG I one time posted (in Finnish) on a Finnish website about my interest in learning Finnish and they didn't believe that I wasn't Finnish until they checked my IP and then thought I was just using google translate until I actually conversed with someone from the websight via skype.
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| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5145 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 3 of 91 16 May 2012 at 12:32am | IP Logged |
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When I speak Spanish to Spaniards. Not because I speak Spanish, but because I speak it with an
Andalusian accent. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Longinus Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4688 days ago 26 posts - 53 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Polish, Macedonian | Message 4 of 91 16 May 2012 at 12:50am | IP Logged |
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I talked to an Iranian couple in the hospital once who were just absolutely overjoyed that I knew a couple of phrases in Persian and could pronounce them correctly.
Funnier, though, is the opposite--the least surprised reaction I've ever gotten. I interviewed a Hungarian job applicant once, a Szekler no less, and at the beginning of the interview I asked her to have a seat in Hungarian (Tessék helyet foglalni.) Nothing, no reaction at all. I don't know enough Hungarian to carry on a conversation, so I made no further attempts to use any more Hungarian phrases I could remember. I asked her about it later, and she just said "Well, I understood you." No surprise at all. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lapislazuli Tetraglot Senior Member Austria Joined 6847 days ago 146 posts - 170 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, ItalianB1 Studies: French, Hungarian, Esperanto, Czech | Message 5 of 91 16 May 2012 at 10:37am | IP Logged |
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Hungarians often get very surpised, when I speak to them in Hungarian and they usually get very happy and enthusastic about it, which is encouraging indeed. Some don't pay that much attention to it at all, which I also like, as then I don't have to spend all the time explaining how and where and why I studied Hungarian.
But I got the most irritated looks from Swedes sometimes, when I spoke to them in Swedish. Some of them seemed to have really wondered how weird a person must be to want to learn Swedish, when there are other more useful/popular/important languages out there one can learn. (Some also told me they can't quite unterstand that.) Not all of them, but this is kind of reaction that I especially got in Sweden. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| eilis91 Bilingual Tetraglot Newbie France Joined 4387 days ago 28 posts - 54 votes Speaks: English*, Irish*, French, Italian Studies: German, Yoruba | Message 6 of 91 16 May 2012 at 12:04pm | IP Logged |
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I came across a middle-aged Turkish man in Turkey who spoke Irish about eight years ago. I almost fainted of
shock. (It turned out he had lived in Donegal for several years.) 10 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Einarr Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom einarrslanguagelog.w Joined 4424 days ago 118 posts - 269 votes Speaks: English, Bulgarian*, French, Russian Studies: Swedish | Message 7 of 91 16 May 2012 at 12:27pm | IP Logged |
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Once at work, a couple of Turkish girls were having a hard time trying to figure out how they can pick up the things they wanted. I obviously know only a little bit of Turkish, so I don't push my luck trying to speak it at all (in order not to say something terribly wrong). Anyway I was following their conversation (btw it's always so funny when you listen to foreigners and they think that you don't know what they speak :D), and by the time the one girls said to the other one: "Uff, speaking Bulgarian is so difficult", I switched to Turkish, and their reaction was like: "But why didn't you say so earlier".
The same happened to me, with another Turkish tourists, the woman I was talking to even asked me if I'm from there, which was funny cause my Turkish is really really poor. :D Apart from that I remember how a Russian was very glad when she got to know that I can communicate in Russian, cause she started off, speaking in immaculate English, but I suggested that we switch. That said, her reaction was quite strange to me, because I thought that Russians would feel way better using their language here (instead of using Russian). And once I remember that one American woman of Greek origin was very pleased of my English, which was kind of nice cause you won't expect anyone being gladly surprised by the fact that you speak English. Edited by Einarr on 16 May 2012 at 12:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ihaveacomputer Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 6644 days ago 21 posts - 52 votes Speaks: English*, Hindi, Punjabi Studies: Urdu, Italian | Message 8 of 91 16 May 2012 at 6:26pm | IP Logged |
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Punjabi speakers have been very pleased with my efforts to learn their language. I've
been interviewed on television three times, received radio show requests, built up over 300,000 views on Youtube, and more. When I arrived at the 2011 World Punjabi Conference, I was recognized by someone at the back of the room and pulled on stage to be given a cash reward! When I was studying the language in India, I made a lot of influential friends in the Punjabi entertainment industry, and was eagerly recruited for roles in a Punjabi movie and theatre (though this is actually quite common these days, especially in Bollywood). I'm often recognized in public here in the Toronto area, where the South Asian community is quite large. I regularly meet Punjabi writers living in the Toronto area, and constantly receive requests to stay with so-and-so's family in India for a few weeks. All of this and I'd say my Punjabi is only somewhere between B2 and C1! 12 persons have voted this message useful |
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