RE: The Great Vowel Divide: Why Japanese and English Sound Worlds Apart

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RE: The Great Vowel Divide: Why Japanese and English Sound Worlds Apart

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azircon in Cross Culture • 11 days ago (edited)

By the way, I learned English in India! God help us, right?!

When I moved to US, oh that is quarter century back, I was fluent in spoken and written English because the medium of education, at least higher education in most places in India is English.

So understand my surprise during the first few weeks in Oklahoma when I didn't understand many locals and many locals didn't understand me!

I still remember the most important bit.

Beer! Bear!

Indian English pronunciation of both these words were same back in those days. They were both “beer”! :)

It became relevant because one of my professors wanted me to accompany him to a field school in Montana and was asking if I can shoot a rifle. Not to kill, but to scare away bears! :)

You get it right!!?

Damn! That was embarrassing!

Funny that the pronunciation problem of “beer” and “Bear” have mostly changed in India now with globalization.

11 days ago in Cross Culture by azircon

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dbooster 10 days ago

I was on the opposite end of that. My major at university was computer science. An area dominated by Indians, at least in education, eh? One of my first classes was a huge shock to me. The prof was a relatively young Indian guy in his 30s. And I could not understand a single word he said for the entire hour. I left class thinking "I'm going to have to drop out of this class. Hell, if all CS is like this, I'm going to have to change my major!"

Some of my other profs were also Indian and I couldn't understand them either!

Luckily, I decided to tough it out and within a few weeks, I could adapt to their speaking cadence and pronunciation, and of course after that I could understand them well. Looking back, it was a great experience but man, that was a bit of a shock seeing how different two major dialects of English can be.

Globalization is having a similar effect here too. A good example might be the v sound. Older Japanese people can't say it at all. They will say biolin, for example, and struggle to produce a v even if you show them and they try to copy. Younger people, however, have no problem saying violin, with that perfect v.

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azircon 10 days ago

In fact English pronunciation can be very different in different parts of India, just like here as well. I know many New Yorkers behave like fish out of water in Alabama :) I have seen it in person.

Thankfully I am originally from Calcutta, in the east coast of India, where the English accent is perhaps on the neutral side. Yet, when you mention computer science, I can safely assume that most of those faculty are from south India. Even I will have hard time understanding that English! That is all that I am saying :)

But, our ears can be trained easily, and we can all get used to accents, it is all for the better.

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