Difficult time understanding Indian accents

Dilliwala

Much of which is spam anyway.

Nick-H

...and CHIPS!

Dilliwala

.
Touche!

kalbarri

is unique, to say the least. without your cynicism, sarcasm, sense of humour and big stick, when needed, this forum would be far less colourful.
you will just have to be reborn as a dumb female and see what happens (on this forum, i mean
oh, forgot to mention, wisdom (and great sense of direction)

Nick-H

We had a ritual burning of the big stick when I left the moderating team. The ashes are now to be smeared on the forehead of all new mods as part of their initiation

Seriously... touched by your lovely comments

sulliwane

hi,

i'm writting an email to invite people to a party which thema will be INDIA and i'd like writte some hindi words.

please could you add a version in Latin characters as I also would like to know how it sounds like.


thanks a lot to my translator

sulliwane.

"We invited the great SHAHRUCKH KHAN!
But well, as he's unavailable, he will be replaced by Shella and her dancers. Maybe they will dance for us!"

LBJ_KING

Lmao at this thread.

Don't worry, I'm half indian (mom's side), born and bought up in the states, and even I can't understand indian accents. I tried watching some bollywood movies, hoping they would sneak a few words of english in but to no avail.
So white people don't worry lol

vireya

Sorry I didn't see this until now, sulliwane. I guess your party has been and gone by now, so it is too late for the translation?

Austin Allegro

I've noticed quite a lot of Americans have trouble understanding English when it is spoken by anyone non-American.

I think this is perhaps because they are not attuned to hearing English spoken with a non-American accent. There is not a great deal of regional variation in the American accent relative to the size of the country, American broadcast media is almost entirely American speakers, and large parts of the US are culturally (and therefore linguistically) homogenous.

The British, on the other hand, are exposed to the American accent via TV from the cradle onwards. We have a multitude of different accents in a small country not only due to regional variations (eg, someone in Oxford has a different accent to London, which are 50 miles apart) but also mass immigration and multiculturalism, esp from the Indian subcontinent.

When I was in India I found I could understand pretty much everyone without difficulty, though there were one or two touts/'guides' who thought they could speak English but who appeared to have learned pronounciation from a stroke victim.

That said, I do sometimes find Glaswegians very difficult to understand!

Eastern Mind

I had a Math prof once.. He kept saying lin eee ar (stress on the eeee) el geee bre (stress on the geee) Took me til half way through the course when out of frustration I looked at the original course outline, and realised it was a linear algebra class.

namaste_cat

Austin A - my American hubby is like this. He has trouble with a lot of non-American accents.

Interestingly, he finds Indian accents not easy but easier to understand than those from the UK, w/ Scottish being the most difficult for him.

My sis-in-law is Welsh, and I think after all these yrs he still barely understands about every 5th word she says

vireya

I'd have to agree with that. On my first trip to the US I had great difficulty getting people to understand me. For example I asked a woman in the post office how much it was to send a postcard (which I was holding in my hand) to Australia. I asked about 5 or 6 times, framing the question every way I could, and she had no idea what I was saying. I don't know what was so difficult - I was in a post office, I was holding a postcard with no stamp, so you would think she could guess that my query might have related to postage. I said the word "Australia" very slowly and drawn out one syllable at a time, but she just didn't get what I wanted. Eventually an African-American gentleman beside me translated for me.

In India on the other hand, I never had someone stare at me blankly when I spoke to them. But I must admit, there was one young cleaner in a hotel in Delhi who I really couldn't understand. I don't know if most of what he said was English or not. All I could get was that he wanted something about getting him a job in Australia; don't know if we were meant to employ him, or what. But maybe he was speaking perfect English, and feels about me the way I felt about that post-office lady in Los Angeles.

karikalan

This is not a problem for one who visits metros like mumbai, b'lore, hyderabad,delhi.

But it is a problem when they travel very interior.

Austin Allegro

Part of it is also to do with idiom as well as accent. For example, an English friend on visiting the US for the first told me he went into a bar and asked for a pint of lager. The barman did not understand, so he repeated the request. The barman said 'You want something called "wah-wah wah-wah"?'

This was not just accent but due to the fact that Americans don't have drinks (unless bottles of spirits) in pints, they use continental measures, and they don't say 'lager' because nearly all their beer is lager anyway. So they'd just say 'gimme a beer' or 'Can I get a Coors Light' or something like that.

Similarly in the US I had to ask for 'water' in a restaurant several times without success. Only when I said 'Wauddah' did they understand!

CFPhotoGrafie

I too have a horribly hard time communicating here...so far I have been in Mumbai only 11 days with a host, surrounded by English speaking upper class

I head out into Rajasthan on my own midweek and am terrified...what if I have to ask for toilet paper (ONLY as an example) and no one understands me or worse they tell me and I have no clue what they've said?! lol

My host in Mumbai was educated in the US and much of his family lives in US and I even have difficulty sometimes understanding him
when dealing with larger shops I seem to do ok
but on the street, I've find a surprising number of locals have NO English whatsoever
and altho I've learned the most basic of phrases in Hindi, putting things into context when more than those words is coming at you can be very difficult indeed

I find that Indians speak English very rapidly (oddly they say the same about me!), and I do feel embarrassed asking them to repeat things but perhaps I'll just have to get over that, or else ask them to write it down since it seems most advertising here is in English or in the English alphabet even when in Hindi

what's even worse is when you understand the WORDS that have been said to you perfectly, but they still make no sense in context to what you are asking