Ahh yes the blanket shit on Americans post.
Make a joke about the British, they’re like “Yeah we do drink a lot of tea did a lot of imperialism, and our food sucks”
Make a joke about the French, and they’re like “ho ho, we are rude and love wine non?”
Make a joke about the Italians, and they’re like “Ay, we do love a pizza, and can’t fight a war!”
Make a joke about Americans, and there’s always the “WHY DO YOU GUYS MAKE FUN OF US! NO FAIR! WHY DO PEOPLE THINK ITS FUNNY TO HATE US?!?”
I’ve experienced only the opposite. Americans love self deprecating humor but Yuros will literally cry about you “abusing my country” if you say one negative thing.
Make a joke about Americans being fucking idiots and don’t expect Americans to laugh along. I mean what do you expect? Yeah we drink a lot of coffee and did slavery and use little creamer cups and eat lots of fried food and spend too much on our military. Americans, right? This? No thanks.
Only one of these four groups have been dunked on incessantly for years upon years with the same three jokes.
jokes are funnier when they’ve got a nugget of truth i think. if the joke was about americans being fat and putting cheese on everything, or about how we’re the richest country in the world but people die all the time because they can’t afford basic medicine, i doubt there’d by any complaints. but saying that we can’t speak any language feels less like poking fun at regional differences, and more like just, idk, lying for the sake of being cruel?
Speak for yourselves. As a Latino born from Mexican immigrants, I speak English and Spanish poorly 😢
My 3 favorite experiences with language as an American:
(1) My Jamaican coworker who I couldn’t understand for the life of me and my Ukrainian coworker who my Jamaican couldn’t understand at all, the Ukrainian coworker understood the Jamaican coworker just fine though and I understood my Ukrainian coworker just fine. Basically it turns into a fun game of telephone whenever we need to talk.
(2) My former coworker from Haiti who no one but the hiring manager and I could understand, the best part about this is that I didn’t know he had an accent. I just didn’t hear it somehow. He was a great guy, he went back home a few years ago when his mother passed. Got stuck due to the pandemic and never came back to the company. I hope he’s doing well.
(3) My former coworker from Guatemala insisting English wasn’t my first language as to him it sounded like English was my second language at best. I’ve been working on it since then. I still suck at it.
This. I think european and asian should be swapped in this meme. I think its rarer to see asian speak 3 languages than seeing european speak 3 languages
As an asian, this has been my experience as well. Of course there are exceptions, but most asians I know (not just in my country) usually just speak 2 languages.
But which part of Asia are you from? Here in India, schools are required (at least on paper) to teach three languages, so most people are at least trilingual.
I think it also really depends where you are, which is why generalising entire continents maybe isn’t very useful. Someone from Luxemburg or somewhere in the Netherlands with more recent immigrants is going to be a lot more likely to speak multiple languages than say someone from Russia or more rural France, just as someone from China is more often going to be monolingual compared to someone from India or Singapore
Dutch, English (Traditional not simplified), and french, and I can understand german but not speak it myself.
Americans have trouble with any accent that isn’t the blandest, nails on chalkboard accent.
Once had one ask me if I was speaking English when I spoke to him (for context I am Irish, the north bit)
Well fucksake mate, when someone asks yous where you’re from, yous go “NornIrn”
Naecunt can unnerstaund thon
Right so don’t really know if this is bait… but that’s one kind of accent (and the tickest pronunciation at that) in ulster, specifically greater Belfast/co. Antrim and very few people speak that thick. For the most part they should be quite understandable from the perspective of anyone who consumes any English language media outside of only American or only London (RP) English. The number of times I have had people have trouble with my accent in Europe and then I ask them what they watched when learning English and the answer is American TV is astounding.
This is me getting on my wee podium now but I have a huge problem with the Americans and Brits for this, they marginalise the fuck out if our dialect, make fun of it for being unitelligible (after making no effort to understand it), and often deny it any legitimacy.
In reality Irish English is spoken by 5-7million people, as large as some dialects of European languages (eg. Austrian/swiss German, Belgian/Swiss French, etc) and if you learn French or German you still get some exposure to those dialects and if you out your mind to it understand it.
I have a huge problem with the Americans and Brits for this, they marginalise the fuck out if our dialect, make fun of it for being unitelligible
I mean I know you’re talking about the wider world and not just this thread, but you started the conversation by being disingenuous about Americans and their dialects. It’s kind of hard for people to take “I have a legitimate dialect” seriously when you just got done trashing half a continent’s worth of dialects
Maybe if we all broach the topic with a little more understanding, you and everyone will feel better about it. For example Appalachian English and Northern Ireland English are both dialects with their own rules of pronunciation and grammar. They’re both legitimate. But it’s not surprising they’d have trouble understanding each other because they have so little interaction. But with patience and mutual respect it can happen
Bland and nails on chalkboard? That’s like the opposite of bland. Not great, but definitely not bland. Bland is blunt and flat. Nails on chalkboard is shrill, sharp, and grating. I just don’t understand how you can believe both at the same time.
Here, I mean more the reaction to it, I sometimes cringe at the pronunciation or intonation in the way one would to nails on a chalkboard (the idiom can have more than one meaning or reaction attached to it)
That doesn’t change the argument. Bland and cringe are also not like each other. I’m all for you criticizing something because it’s different than you, but at least use your language consistently and properly. How would anyone interpret a secondary analogy without knowing how you personally react? It already has a clear meaning on its surface. Occam’s razor would indicate that’s enough. Why would anyone invent a second possible scenario that’s only knowable if you have access to information that isn’t well known, and in this case, near certainty of being unknown? Just say hearing the accent from some other country makes you cringe. Communication doesn’t have to be difficult unless you make it so.
My god son, just how many marbles were you trying to eat while talking to those nice Americans? You do know that the untied states has around 30 dialects, and every accent from around the world, right? I’m sure you knew better than that when you generalized 300 million people into one anecdote.
