I'm at summer soccer camps now and it's ABSOLUTELY AWESOME!! I'm here with the Brazilian women's national team coach, a Scot, a New Zealander, a Zambian, 4 Brits, and 7 americans (two of whom were born in Portugal and are fluent in Portugese). A great mix huh?
so why is it Americans have such a hard time following our accents? But they are strangely intrigued by them? Don't Americans realise they have an accent too? And a pretty weird one at that? It's funny the way Americans expect other people to talk like they do and can't appreciate the fact that a T is a T and not a D. We all went to Friendly's for dinner one night and we had such a hard time ordering a glass of waTer with our solid T's and flat R's. The waitress kept hearing ... well who knows what she thought we were saying.
Yet on the other hand, the foreign coaches always draw the most attention, all we have to do is talk, hehehe. The parents are most enthralled as they meet us when they come to drop off the kids: "I notice you have an accent, where are you from?" all excited: "oh REALLY!" You'd think they'd be a little more sensitive to picking up the nuances of accents and try to avoid asking over and over "what was that?"
What's notable is the fact that the kids are fine, I have no problem with my Rec practice kids or my U-11 and U-12 teams, or any of the kids who come here. It's the adults that have somehow developed a filter of some sort and are only able to follow their own accent. Unfortunate really. One reason why people think Americans are not "world citizens." In my opinion it's a comfort zone issue: although interested, they are also intimidated, having lost the curiosty and fresh brain cells of youth.
Oh well...more later, I'm sure there'll be plenty to write about from this whole camp experience. Cheers.
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2 comments:
Janelle, I'm glad you noticed that. We had a very long talk in Brazil between my family, Troy, and Aase about this. You know, both of them not speaking Portuguese, but trying to, and we would understand 99% of what they tried to say. Even if it didn't sound anything like the real deal.
The conversation came up because my dad or my mom would say something in English, and Troy would have a little trouble understanding it the first time, and Aase would understand it right away, even though english is not her first language, and she is not familiar with the brazilian accent.
My father always brings up that when he tries to speak english in the US, nobody understands him, even though he sounds just a little different from the word he's trying to say. An example he always gives is of when he went to Disney World and wanted to order and iced-t. He pronounced it something like "ICEDE-TEE", and nobody could understand him.
As you can imagine, I too get thousands of "what?" "what?", but I won't lose my accent just because you like it ;) Just kidding.
some of it is lack of experience too. if they live in a place where there are few people unlike them.
i never had a real problems with accents too much. i hope you'll be happy to know that i can distinguish a jamaican from a trini from a guyanese. during the year on trinidad i also got to where i could distinguish between subgroups of trinis :D. sadly, a lot of americans don't get it but there are those of us who do .
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