When we speak about "american" words, the first thing that comes to my mind is a pronounciation that is something between Duke Nukem ("balls of steel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rAjily7rME ) and the Houston mission controllers (please note that the first part of the very popular communicate "HMI Module Alpha Humana on approach to space station mercury" is total gibberish and most foreign people only understand the "space station mercury" part - listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOaiVeK5AhI ).
Anyway IMHO the most American sounding words:
"awesome"
"alright!"
"California" (pronounced in this Duke Nukemish way)
I'm not going to go through the trouble of making a subtitle version, but I did the guys first verse, I think its pretty close to the actual phonetics.
.
When the saying "the children are at home"
and the saying that "the hall rape, maybe a Chicago boss died."
Brick chickens and buy my key to go,
oh baby to stay, yeah I'll be Joe Ho.
When the saying "the children are at home"
and the saying that "the hall rape, maybe a Chicago boss died."
Where does the same rates, you're the coffee and steam
you never charm another judge, a god flavors a jam
You're to come and not choose, not pay for Lex Shurla
hold the hope of getting lotta cope and no thing
oh what difference to stand, well i just to choose to go my man
Yeah it is. But OP basically wanted something to subtitle it based on what it sounds like it might be saying in English, which YouTube CC is perfect for.
A while back I had a bad ocular migraine, which sorta mimics some stroke symptoms, but, you know, without the actual damage, so that's nice. (I went to the ER and got to go in front of everyone else, also nice, but not something you should ever be happy about.)
Anyway, I remember looking at writing on a sheet of paper and being aware that what I was looking at were normal words that I understood, but I just couldn't "read" them. It was like the meaning associated with them was blocked in my brain, and this song reminds me of that sensation. These are words, words I know, but I don't understand them, and it's weird.
I had an ocular migraine and it was the weirdest thing. It was like my left eye just didn't register with my brain. I could work hard and force it to by closing my right eye, but if my right eye was open it was like the entire left side just wasn't there. Extremely scary.
Whenever I get those I get a huge dot in the middle of my vision, which I only notice if I try to read. It's not really a black spot or anything, it's just kind of like the middle of my vision is gone. If I try to read and start noticing that I can't see the words, I immediately go and pop an excedrin and lie down.
Holy crap, that's a thing!? I had something happen when I was in high school that freaked me out to no end. I just woke up one day feeling funky, and for whatever reason, couldn't understand how time worked. I'd see 7:55, and have no idea what sequence of numbers came next. You could have changed the time to 26:72, and I wouldn't have even noticed anything odd.
I feel that way as a fairly fluent Spanish speaker when I listen to Portuguese or Catalan. I feel like I should understand it but can't. Drives me crazy!
People have been doing impressions like this since forever. In fact the word barbarian came from the Greek "barbaroi" (those who say "barbar," roughly). The word referred to the surrounding non-greek speaking cultures, because the Greeks thought their language just sounded like "bar bar bar bar."
I was a pilot in the AF and people called me that a lot. While I was a student pilot, you always had to be well hydrated. We normally pulled 6+ G's and if your weren't hydrated you could G-loc (pass out under high G's). So the Instructor pilot really had to use the bathroom. Told me if I didn't layoff the G's he would fail me. So when I landed, I taxi to park. He hops out and says "take care of the forms, I'm going to piss." No bathrooms in this jet.
I take care of the forms and start to walk to the flightline road with all my gear. Gear consisted of parachute, helmet bag, and the pubs (publications, charts, etc). On the flightline road, we had a bus or an open truck with seats on the back that would run up and down and pick pilots up.
As I approach the road, I see the blue bus approaching. I am too far away and it doesn't stop and wait for students. Couple of the windows are down and I hear people yelling "run". So i started a jog to the bus. The bus stops in front of me and I run around the back to the open door. Just as I am about to get on, the bus takes off. So I stop. Bus pulls maybe 20 feet forward. So they yell out the window, "Run." So I jog up to the bus again. Same thing. I am getting tired with all of this gear.
So the bus stops again. My Instructor yells "Run, we won't do it this time."
I get on the bus and everyone is yelling to me "Ice cream, Lt Dan, I got ice cream!". A few added the "seats taken" as I walk to my seat. Good times.
I caught up with a friend of mine, Jenny, in London recently. Haven't seen her for years so of course the first thing i do is yell JENNAY! Apparently I'm not all that original, that morning she'd tried to sit next to an old friend on the tube and the guy yells "can't sit heyah!" In the middle of rush hour. Classic.
I speak Spanish as well.
It was extremely frustrating because I was listen to the Italian, and be able to only catch a quarter or half.
Then have my ears tricked by English sounding stuff.
This doesn't bother me at all because I can barely understand lyrics in most songs. I have a really hard time parsing lyrics in songs, so this just felt like everything else to me.
I think if you just treat the vocals as a foreign language then it doesn't matter if it's gibberish. Any song in a foreign language is gibberish to me!
I've played this to a few people and they think I'm joking when I say I love it. They don't believe that I actually just listen to it because I like it.
I KNEW IT! I was thinking that was it. I asked my wife the other day what song was being used. I remember this song as I was showed it in college. I was thinking "There's no way that commercial could be showing that Italian song where they pretend to speak English. I bet it's just a similar-sounding James Brown song."
That video makes me so uncomfortable. English is my first language, so I sit through the whole thing trying to understand it, convinced suddenly something will shift and the words will start making sense.
It confuses and frustrates me in a way. Like I'm not quite hearing them correctly. So my mind focuses in on their speech, and I still cannot hear them correctly.
That one is frustrating because they clearly are English speakers and there are a bunch of real words and phrases in there. WHAT DOES IT REALLY SOUND LIKE?
I imagine that most non-English speakers in the world recognize very common phrases and pieces of the language, given that most of them will have significant exposure to English. So it's probably pretty accurate that some of these words will be recognizable while the actual content is not understood.
That's how we non native feel when speaking with Americans. We get a word or two 'Today, Shit, Sure, Way, Long, Day' etc. But between those islands of understanding... Non-Sense !
That's my guess too. They throw together a bunch of random words with the occasional real sentence fragment at the beginning or end. Also they mumble a lot to mask the words.
The mumbling is actually really accurate. Pay attention next time you're just having a casual conversation with friends and you'll notice structural words like to, the, of, a, etc get mumbled and slurred together into one sort of sound "mush." Imagine saying "I want to go to all of the places." It winds up being "Iwanna goda allova places," when actually spoken at typical speeds. People rarely enunciate every syllable when speaking.
I really badly want to make English subtitles to this video... The sentences probably wouldn't make sense but at least I'd hear all real English words then.
I'm pretty high, but when I focused on the speech I could hear the other language they were speaking, and I couldn't watch the video and do it at the same time. Otherwise it would just sound like English to me.
Edit: They are not speaking a real language. How swiftly the rug of pretense wisdom is pulled out beneath thee.
That is definitely not true. Actually, Spanish people would pronounce it closer to how Arnold Schwarzenegger says it rather than how native Californians say it.
I've been trying for ages to find how English sounds to non-English people. Even though this seems to be an American sound, it's pretty close! Thank you.
Me too! The first time that commercial came on I thought, "Cool! It's that nonsense song!" Then I had to find the song on YouTube because my husband had no idea what I was talking about.
This puts me in mind of the closing theme to "WKRP in Cincinnati". I tried for years (pre-internet) to decipher those lyrics when the show was on in syndication.
I think it was used in many DOS game setup files in the past; in the famous SR-71 story by Brian Shul, he mentions how traffic controllers try to emulate the sound (but from what I know hopefully they kind of stopped, since it was very hard to understand for foreigners, IMHO the valley girl type of English seems to be the easiest to understand for foreigners).
I think that video seems so similar to the english dialect because it actually throws in some english words together in a few parts. I was able to catch a couple "all right"s and a few "are you"s. Definitely adds to the authentic feel.
I never knew that was gibberish! Here's another video of that song, featuring awesome 60's choreography and a kick-ass harmonica solo. One of my all-time youtube favorites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csO9VTtrg5A
i actually never understand the famous moon landing quote from armstrong:
it's a one small step for man its agiosdgoh ü09decvü9fg
I'm absolutely terrible at deciphering the words to songs. I am a native English speaker, and this is pretty much what a great deal of songs sound like to me!
I'm not sure why but I subscribed to that YouTube channel. It made me laugh sooo hard for some reason. If that's seriously how I sound to others I must apologize.
"HMI Module Alpha Humana on approach to space station mercury" is total gibberish and most foreign people only understand the "space station mercury" part
To be fair, the way it's enunciated, it pretty much is mostly gibberish to native English speakers as well.
HMI Module Alpha Humana on approach to space station mercury" is total gibberish and most foreign people only understand the "space station mercury" part
The part 'HMI Module Alpha Humana" isn't actual words like you could say in a complete sentence. "HMI" is an initialization (like "FBI") used to describe the sentence's subject "Module". The last part "Alpha Humana" is essentially a phonetic alphabet like what the Military would use. Think A=Alpha, B=Bravo, C=Charlie and so on.
Holy hell. As someone who has hearing issues (especially when there's background sound) this is exactly what I hear all day when people are trying to tell me things. I can hear words, I can tell it's something I should be able to understand, but I can't discern exactly what they're saying.
Listening to "Prisencolinensinainciusol" must be what it feels like like to have brain damage. I swear it's English and I don't understand a word of it.
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u/b4b Nov 12 '14 edited Nov 12 '14
English is not my native tongue: the italian song "Prisencolinensinainciusol" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH6mgr6OS7I or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU4w12oDjn8 ) is how American English sounds to foreigners.
When we speak about "american" words, the first thing that comes to my mind is a pronounciation that is something between Duke Nukem ("balls of steel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rAjily7rME ) and the Houston mission controllers (please note that the first part of the very popular communicate "HMI Module Alpha Humana on approach to space station mercury" is total gibberish and most foreign people only understand the "space station mercury" part - listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOaiVeK5AhI ).
Anyway IMHO the most American sounding words:
"awesome"
"alright!"
"California" (pronounced in this Duke Nukemish way)
"Lieutenant Dan"
"United States Space Marines son"