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I am talking with someone (a girl I met online) and she says she speaks perfect American? I speak Canadian. Can anyone tell me if they can tell a difference between perfect American and perfect Canadian English? I am finding the American English is very hard to understand when someone speaks to me over the telephone any when texting it is not much better. Anyone here notice a difference?

Could be that you have a midwest accent which is the flat american accent you hear most newscasters speak with here in the states because it is the easiest to understand

the accent I heard was a horrible slurring of words together and I could not tell where one word ended and the next word started. It was horrible English.

 Nick Garai wrote:
the accent I heard was a horrible slurring of words together and I could not tell where one word ended and the next word started. It was horrible English.

I totally misread your initial statement, being half asleep and posting isn't a good idea my bad

None of you speak proper English like what I do!

Damit. My flag is wrong totally messing up that joke.

 Nick Garai wrote:
the accent I heard was a horrible slurring of words together and I could not tell where one word ended and the next word started. It was horrible English.

Very fast, or very slow? If it's fast and clipped, probably a Yankee accent, like New York. If it's fast, clipped, and also has really exaggerated vowels, it's likely a variant of the Boston accent- pronounced by those who bear it Bawstahn. That trends down to Southern accents, where the tempo is slow and everything gently runs together. Deep Louisiana accents sound like someone threw the sentence into a pot and let it simmer for a few hours- sounds are comprehensible, but words are difficult to separate. American English has dozens, if not hundreds of regional variations of pronunciations, usually with slang to match. If you know their home state, that'll narrow it down for us. Otherwise we listen for tells, and localize from there.

Do they say pop or soda?
You'se guys or y'all, or all'a'y'all?
Sneakers, gym shoes, or tennis shoes?

As someone that doesn't have english as his native tongue I've never heard many differences between american and canadian english. I mean I can't say if someone is american or canadian just by hearing some conversations.

I can perfectly recognize UK and Australia accents but canadian and american look basically the same to me.

There are lots of peculiar and unique local accents for sure but if I hear something from the TV I really couldn't say if someone is american or canadian. Many famous actors and actresses that work for the american movies and tv series industry are from Canada and I learned it only by visiting their wikipedia page.

Wait, you folks speak English?

Just kidding.

I find Americans the easiest people to understand, they seem to really like to pronounce things clearly. I travelled from the north east to the mid west down to the south and at no point in time did I have trouble understanding anyone. It was quite enjoyable listening to all the subtle (and not so subtle) differences across regions of the USA.

This is not meant as a slur, but when I hear Americans talking it's almost like they're talking to young kids. When I hear a lot of other English speakers among adults they'll tend to blur their words together and when they're talking to kids they speak clearer, that's what Americans sounded like all the time to me.

What surprised me is that Americans seem to struggle to understand everyone else A lot of Americans struggled with my Australian accent and a couple of times when watching European movies with American friends they told me they couldn't understand the various European accents even when I understood them fine.

It was hilarious watching an American struggle to understand an Englishman.

It can depend on her age, girls in particular can sound like they are talking gibberish and the younger they are and the more they communicate via text and emojis the worse it gets. They are basically devolving into something that passes for human but are in reality primitive ape like creatures with a forwards slumped posture never once looking up from their phones and communicating in hieroglyphics through their thumbs. You're lucky if you even get an audible grunt or acknowledgement that isn't passed along in the form of a facebook "like", emoji, or right swipe.


Or you could be suffering from grumpy old man selective hearing, aka "I don't speak idiot" which typically goes like this, I've heard everything you just said for the last 15 minutes straight, yet I don't care and I choose not to understand a word of it because it was all off topic yammering and is basically useless garbage to me. I find that as I get older this becomes my typical mode of dealing with the human race, male or female. Eventually you stop caring entirely and just leave your hearing aide turned off all the time as you prefer silence over suffering through the lunacy of other people.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

What surprised me is that Americans seem to struggle to understand everyone else A lot of Americans struggled with my Australian accent and a couple of times when watching European movies with American friends they told me they couldn't understand the various European accents even when I understood them fine.

I think it's partly due to a sense of American exceptionalism; many Americans simply don't care all that much about the outside world. The other reason, and the more important one in my mind, is lack of exposure. The rest of the English-speaking world (and beyond!) are exposed to massive amounts of American English, but for Americans hearing spoken British, Australian, Irish, Indian or any other kind of English is much rarer. Exposure is the most important factor when it comes to understanding a language. Case in point: when my sister and I visited the UK a year and a half ago it became apparent that I understood most of the people we met better than she did, but when we watch American movies or TV series, or when listening to Australian English, she has an easier time than I do. I've spent more time in the UK, she's been to the US and Australia while I haven't.

Then again, sometimes one group has an easier time understanding another than the other way around for different reasons. Swedes and Danes, for example. Spoken Swedish is usually more clearly articulated than spoken Danish, and sounds more like a Dane trying to speak very slowly and clearly. Danes generally understand Swedes better than we do them. There's also the factor of more exposure though, Danes watch more Swedish television than Swedes watch Danish, to a large extent because most of Denmark is really close to Sweden and can tune in to our broadcasts easily, while only the those in the south of Sweden can do the same with Danish television.

 Cream Tea wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

What surprised me is that Americans seem to struggle to understand everyone else A lot of Americans struggled with my Australian accent and a couple of times when watching European movies with American friends they told me they couldn't understand the various European accents even when I understood them fine.

I think it's partly due to a sense of American exceptionalism; many Americans simply don't care all that much about the outside world. The other reason, and the more important one in my mind, is lack of exposure. The rest of the English-speaking world (and beyond!) are exposed to massive amounts of American English, but for Americans hearing spoken British, Australian, Irish, Indian or any other kind of English is much rarer. Exposure is the most important factor when it comes to understanding a language. Case in point: when my sister and I visited the UK a year and a half ago it became apparent that I understood most of the people we met better than she did, but when we watch American movies or TV series, or when listening to Australian English, she has an easier time than I do. I've spent more time in the UK, she's been to the US and Australia while I haven't.

Then again, sometimes one group has an easier time understanding another than the other way around for different reasons. Swedes and Danes, for example. Spoken Swedish is usually more clearly articulated than spoken Danish, and sounds more like a Dane trying to speak very slowly and clearly. Danes generally understand Swedes better than we do them. There's also the factor of more exposure though, Danes watch more Swedish television than Swedes watch Danish, to a large extent because most of Denmark is really close to Sweden and can tune in to our broadcasts easily, while only the those in the south of Sweden can do the same with Danish television.

That and Danes talk "like they have a potato in their mouth" (according to various Scandinavian sources of mine, none of which are Danish shockingly). But yeah that lack of exposure is a big thing. It extends to writing as well, how many times have you seen a yank get on fb and "correct" a meme because there was no z in a word, or they included a u, etc. It happens a depressing amount of time.

America is a big place. We've got a lot of different accents. People from New England talk pretty different from people in Florida. Hell, people from Bawston talk pretty different from... well everyone.

Having spent some time in Canada, I've noticed you guys have quirks about your dialect that are different from ours, for the most part. Eh.

But you can't really point to any one place in America, and say that is representative of the entire nation. We've just got many different dialects of English.

As an non-English, I can hear the Canadian as a normal English, but the American English - with a strong accent, which is harder to understand.

 motyak wrote:
That and Danes talk "like they have a potato in their mouth" (according to various Scandinavian sources of mine, none of which are Danish shockingly). But yeah that lack of exposure is a big thing. It extends to writing as well, how many times have you seen a yank get on fb and "correct" a meme because there was no z in a word, or they included a u, etc. It happens a depressing amount of time.

Danish children have slower language acquisition than children learning other Nordic languages. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ947181 Danish has quite a few phonemes that are either hard to learn or hard to distinguish from each other. Most languages has some phonemes that are harder for children to learn, but Danish seems to be less kid-friendly than most. Well, spoken Danish. When it comes to written language English is a lot worse, and Japanese and Mandarin vastly more so.

On the topic of American English, I find the East Coast accents are often the easiest to understand, along with Californian ones (because movie). I'm not very good at telling the difference between American accents though, and truth to be told I can't really distinguish too well between Canadian and American English.

I can usually pick up the Canadian accent. "About" vs "A-Boot" is an easy one. I travel all over the US and parts of Canada. Regional accents are certainly a thing. I have some international coworkers who absolutely can't understand people in our manufacturing plant in Alabama. It may as well be Boomhauer from King of the Hill talking to them.

I have a hard time once in a while with fast talkers from New York City, and Newark airport folks can feth right the hell off. That ain't English!

 Cream Tea wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

What surprised me is that Americans seem to struggle to understand everyone else A lot of Americans struggled with my Australian accent and a couple of times when watching European movies with American friends they told me they couldn't understand the various European accents even when I understood them fine.

I think it's partly due to a sense of American exceptionalism; many Americans simply don't care all that much about the outside world. The other reason, and the more important one in my mind, is lack of exposure. The rest of the English-speaking world (and beyond!) are exposed to massive amounts of American English, but for Americans hearing spoken British, Australian, Irish, Indian or any other kind of English is much rarer. Exposure is the most important factor when it comes to understanding a language. Case in point: when my sister and I visited the UK a year and a half ago it became apparent that I understood most of the people we met better than she did, but when we watch American movies or TV series, or when listening to Australian English, she has an easier time than I do. I've spent more time in the UK, she's been to the US and Australia while I haven't.

I find that interesting. Being Australian I don't have much exposure to Europe other than what I watch on TV but I seem to understand Scots, Irish and Englishmen all reasonably well (the only thing that throws me is local slang rather than the accent itself, I'll understand the words they spoke but not the actual meaning of local slang).

I figured it was partly because Australian is another one of those accents where we tend to blur the language together rather than enunciate, so maybe we understand other accents that do a similar thing, while Americans tend to enunciate quite clearly (except for maybe some really hardcore redneck folk, I'm looking at you NASCAR drivers) so maybe don't understand us folk that don't do the same.

One thing was clear that people who learned English as a 2nd language in the US had absolutely no hope of understanding an Australian accent. There were times I literally had to use my American friends to translate Australian to American for Chinese/Polish/Hispanic/etc. folk because they could not understand me in the slightest.

I don't know if people who learned English as a 2nd language in Australia have the same problems understanding Americans.

As for foreigners being exposed to a massive amount of American English - in some ways, yeah, but Hollywood tends to speak with a relatively neutral accent and even when actors are putting on an accent they tend to enunciate quite clearly. You 'muricans maybe don't notice, but watching a local news program in the US the accents come out a lot more than in movies that actually make it across the oceans, even more so when actually talking to the man on the street.

Another thing that surprised me was the Americans I lived with struggle to tell accents apart, maybe that is just an exposure thing. I lived with a guy for 6 months and one day we watched a New Zealand movie and he commented that he couldn't tell the difference between them and me, whereas I could quite easily tell the difference between someone who grew up in PA vs NJ vs NYC (NYC has a whole bunch of accents within itself).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 djones520 wrote:
But you can't really point to any one place in America, and say that is representative of the entire nation. We've just got many different dialects of English.

There's definitely a lot of variation in accents in the US, but I don't think as much as to create problems. Compare a Yorkshireman to, I dunno, a Welshman and a Lancastrian, that's 3 exceptionally unique dialects. Compared to that the US has a pretty uniform language

That's the beautiful thing about BBC neutral English. Everyone understands it, be they American, Australian, Canadian, Kiwis, or a second language altogether.

I've rarely had an issue understanding any form of English. I have friends from all over the globe, never an issue unless non-British slang is involved. I have had issue understanding people from Quebec, and Cajun country though.

I spent part of my childhood in South East Asia and had a lot of English and Australian friends, and I absorbed the different ways they pronounced things or used words I typically wouldn't use in the US, like 'trek'. I might have even picked up 'Eh' as I had some Canadian friends too.

All this gave me a terrible time in English class as I was raised to spell as you pronounce it, yet that was hard to do for me when I could pronounce a number of words a different way. I never recovered and my grammar still blows today.

neither is a language but dialects of English, not that anyone here speaks "english" anyway lol

 Inquisitor Lord Bane wrote:
I've rarely had an issue understanding any form of English. I have friends from all over the globe, never an issue unless non-British slang is involved. I have had issue understanding people from Quebec, and Cajun country though.

That's the French influence. Quebec has a huge French speaking population and radically different culture from the rest of Canada. Even those who speak English from there will have an influence on them.

Its fairly easy to tell a Québécois apart from a regular Canadian. Understanding him is another story.

About the only English dialect I have issues with might be some very thick Scottish accents.

Then there is the Welsh language which I don't even know if they can understand each other Their sentence structure seems akin to a Yodle and a gargle mashed into a massive run on sentence.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Bane wrote:
I've rarely had an issue understanding any form of English. I have friends from all over the globe, never an issue unless non-British slang is involved. I have had issue understanding people from Quebec, and Cajun country though.

That's the French influence. Quebec has a huge French speaking population and radically different culture from the rest of Canada. Even those who speak English from there will have an influence on them.

Its fairly easy to tell a Québécois apart from a regular Canadian. Understanding him is another story.

About the only English dialect I have issues with might be some very thick Scottish accents.

Then there is the Welsh language which I don't even know if they can understand each other Their sentence structure seems akin to a Yodle and a gargle mashed into a massive run on sentence.

I'm Welsh and I can tell you that you are 100% correct, even members of my own family give me trouble like my uncle pat, I feel like I need an Enigma machine to decipher him when he gets talking, we also literally speak another language (Welsh) and sometimes do so just to wind up the English.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Wait, you folks speak English?

Just kidding.

I find Americans the easiest people to understand, they seem to really like to pronounce things clearly. I travelled from the north east to the mid west down to the south and at no point in time did I have trouble understanding anyone. It was quite enjoyable listening to all the subtle (and not so subtle) differences across regions of the USA.

This is not meant as a slur, but when I hear Americans talking it's almost like they're talking to young kids. When I hear a lot of other English speakers among adults they'll tend to blur their words together and when they're talking to kids they speak clearer, that's what Americans sounded like all the time to me.

What surprised me is that Americans seem to struggle to understand everyone else A lot of Americans struggled with my Australian accent and a couple of times when watching European movies with American friends they told me they couldn't understand the various European accents even when I understood them fine.

It was hilarious watching an American struggle to understand an Englishman.

You understood them all fine? Did you stop in Boston or Philly? I know some people from around there and holy feth, sometimes I think they speak a different language. On the flip side of that, I played a lot of online gaming in my youth and became friends with many Australians, Canadians, and Brits. Generally, I have no trouble understanding the accents, but I have met a few from each I honestly have trouble with sometimes. I couldn't tell if it was the accent or they were mumbling. As soon as somebody starts to mumble I stop being able to understand them almost instantly. It happens a lot over here here with American English or as I like to call it, Westerosi.

I generally have a hard time distinguishing between different English accents. I recognise some British accents because I lived in the UK for a bit, and I can also recognise a Texan/Southern US accent because it is so distinctive, but I can not really tell a Canadian or Australian accent apart for example. Or an Australian and a New Zealand accent. Or some of the many other accents in the British isles. On the other hand, I have no problem distinguishing accents in Dutch or Russian, so I guess that ability simply comes with being a native speaker.

Also, I have been told that my accent sounds like a German trying to do a Russian accent in English. Ay zynk zey yz veirrt.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Bane wrote:
I've rarely had an issue understanding any form of English. I have friends from all over the globe, never an issue unless non-British slang is involved. I have had issue understanding people from Quebec, and Cajun country though.

That's the French influence. Quebec has a huge French speaking population and radically different culture from the rest of Canada. Even those who speak English from there will have an influence on them.

Its fairly easy to tell a Québécois apart from a regular Canadian. Understanding him is another story.

About the only English dialect I have issues with might be some very thick Scottish accents.

Then there is the Welsh language which I don't even know if they can understand each other Their sentence structure seems akin to a Yodle and a gargle mashed into a massive run on sentence.

And then there's Newfoundland.

 Crazy_Carnifex wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Bane wrote:
I've rarely had an issue understanding any form of English. I have friends from all over the globe, never an issue unless non-British slang is involved. I have had issue understanding people from Quebec, and Cajun country though.

That's the French influence. Quebec has a huge French speaking population and radically different culture from the rest of Canada. Even those who speak English from there will have an influence on them.

Its fairly easy to tell a Québécois apart from a regular Canadian. Understanding him is another story.

About the only English dialect I have issues with might be some very thick Scottish accents.

Then there is the Welsh language which I don't even know if they can understand each other Their sentence structure seems akin to a Yodle and a gargle mashed into a massive run on sentence.

And then there's Newfoundland.

Sweet mother of god, how anyone understands them is beyond me, I am not even sure some of them were human let alone speaking English

 Formosa wrote:


Sweet mother of god, how anyone understands them is beyond me, I am not even sure some of them were human let alone speaking English

You need to be as drunk as they are to truly understand them.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Also, I have been told that my accent sounds like a German trying to do a Russian accent in English.

Dude, that sounds awesome!

I've been told that my accent sounds Dutch, I think it's mostly because I don't have that distinctive Swedish accent (you know the one, pitch goes up and down rhythmically like some sort of weird song). I don't speak Dutch.

 Formosa wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Bane wrote:
I've rarely had an issue understanding any form of English. I have friends from all over the globe, never an issue unless non-British slang is involved. I have had issue understanding people from Quebec, and Cajun country though.

That's the French influence. Quebec has a huge French speaking population and radically different culture from the rest of Canada. Even those who speak English from there will have an influence on them.

Its fairly easy to tell a Québécois apart from a regular Canadian. Understanding him is another story.

About the only English dialect I have issues with might be some very thick Scottish accents.

Then there is the Welsh language which I don't even know if they can understand each other Their sentence structure seems akin to a Yodle and a gargle mashed into a massive run on sentence.

I'm Welsh and I can tell you that you are 100% correct, even members of my own family give me trouble like my uncle pat, I feel like I need an Enigma machine to decipher him when he gets talking, we also literally speak another language (Welsh) and sometimes do so just to wind up the English.

It would help if you kept the number of vowels per word to a maximum of 2-3. And stop crutching on Y, there are other letters you know!

 Dreadwinter wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Wait, you folks speak English?

Just kidding.

I find Americans the easiest people to understand, they seem to really like to pronounce things clearly. I travelled from the north east to the mid west down to the south and at no point in time did I have trouble understanding anyone. It was quite enjoyable listening to all the subtle (and not so subtle) differences across regions of the USA.

This is not meant as a slur, but when I hear Americans talking it's almost like they're talking to young kids. When I hear a lot of other English speakers among adults they'll tend to blur their words together and when they're talking to kids they speak clearer, that's what Americans sounded like all the time to me.

What surprised me is that Americans seem to struggle to understand everyone else A lot of Americans struggled with my Australian accent and a couple of times when watching European movies with American friends they told me they couldn't understand the various European accents even when I understood them fine.

It was hilarious watching an American struggle to understand an Englishman.

You understood them all fine? Did you stop in Boston or Philly? I know some people from around there and holy feth, sometimes I think they speak a different language. On the flip side of that, I played a lot of online gaming in my youth and became friends with many Australians, Canadians, and Brits. Generally, I have no trouble understanding the accents, but I have met a few from each I honestly have trouble with sometimes. I couldn't tell if it was the accent or they were mumbling. As soon as somebody starts to mumble I stop being able to understand them almost instantly. It happens a lot over here here with American English or as I like to call it, Westerosi.

I passed through Philly a few times and don't recall running in to anyone I couldn't understand. Never got up to Boston, spent a day in a town about an hour or two outside of Boston.

But yeah can't say I had any problem anywhere. I met up with some folk in a country town in Kentucky who had a pretty unique way of speaking, but not hard to understand at all.

I didn't find any crazy swings in language use, not like you find in some regions of the UK. Mumbling is one thing, but there's times where I perfectly understand the sounds being made but still can't figure out what the bastards are saying. That never happened to me in the US though.