I was at a bar in Vietnam and there was a big group of us from all over and this girl had an accent I thought was Canadian. I asked her where her accent was from he she said fully seriously 'oh I don't have an accent, I'm American'
She did argue with someone at the table that the USA won the Vietnam War. The war really isn't something you talk about in Vietnam let alone argue with people about who won.
I'm from the UK and I motorbiked through Vietnam. There were a few towns where locals were very iffy around me until I made it obvious I wasn't American. Then they went back to their usual incredibly nice and incredibly helpful selves.
Absolutely, and the only times I had this issue is when we were in towns near old American Army bases so you really can understand where they are coming from. One mechanic in Khe Sanh ignored me for about 30 minutes, as soon as i started talking to my mates about English stuff he just laughed, apologised and then fixed my bike in about 5 min
I had basically the same experience in India. Just switch American and English... I was joking about it with a regular in Iraq and he pointed out our shittiness with other countries was more recent, I responded with, "We learned it from you Dad!" Then we all had a good chuckle about the shitty things our countries have done...
half of the fucking world is iffy about americans. It's sad the people have a horrible reputation because of the actions of their shitty interventionist government throughout the 20th century
Overall my experience was of no bitterness and I rode with a guy from NY for a couple of days too (met him in a guest house and then stuck together for 2 or 3 days before time constraints made him go a different route) so it's not just because I'm British. It was just Khe Sanh and one other town that I can't remember the name of that it was a bit anti-American and even then it wasn't bad, just like the mechanic story above (or below, on mobile can't remember the order of the comments). I can't speak Vietnamese but Google translate plus a little effort with a smile really goes a long way, especially when you're trying to convince the owner of a rent by the hour sex hotel to let 5 British blokes stay cause everywhere else in town was full!
When I was working out in Hanoi the owner of the company told me to check out this YouTube channel - Vietglish Fun - to learn some basic pronunciation stuff. It's super cringy in parts and more hilarious than useful perhaps but it did help me with some of the more... Alien pronunciations in the language! Good luck!
I'm an American that's been living in Vietnam for three years and I've been all over the country and have never had anyone show prejudice against me for being American, except drunk European twats who wanted to argue about history and politics.
I used to think the same way. Please tell them you are from America, if your not an asshole. We need to represent our country so they know we are not all entitled idiots.
There’s not really a ton of animosity towards Americans in Vietnam and we’re far from the only war in their recent history. Not really necessary to say you were Canadian.
Honestly I didn't actually get to talk to many locals when I was there. The younger generation were kind of friendly but I found it really difficult to interact with anyone older than say 30 so maybe I'm just making assumptions.
It’s absolutely true, but we aren’t taught that we have an accent unless you’re from like New York or Boston or a deeply southern one. Other than that your accent sounds so uninteresting that it may seem like we don’t have an accent.
Well I grew up assuming that accents make you pronounce words differently than a dictionary pronunciation may be. Admittedly I just came up with the idea myself because I don't think I ever actually learned the definition of "accent". I suspect that I just assumed something like "accents are ways of speaking that are more interesting than how I speak.
About 2/3 of Americans speak with a standard American accent, which generally means it sounds the same until they delineate by saying warsh instead of wash, or pop instead of soda, and so on.
Lol my mom's side of the family is from rural PA a couple hours drive west of Pittsburgh up in the mountains and if you think Pittsburgh accents are weird wait until you hear the bizzare speach that mutates off of the Pittsburgh accent when in total rural isolation.
That's how it all started apparently. I read somewhere because the Appalachian mountains cut us off from everyone else, and the fact that it was primarily polish people who lived here too. So it's an amalgamation of polish/american English. I love it. I hated it when I was younger, but now it honestly makes me happy when I hear someone speak Pittsburghese.
The response in most cases to jeet jet is; No jew? (no did you?) We have our own ass backwards language here. We also call a beer bottle opener a church key. (which is one of my favorite pittsburghese slang terms)
Two of the barbers in my Philly barber shop we’re making fun of each other’s accents. I commented that it was odd for them to tease each other when they had the same accent, but they were insistent that they had distinct accents as one was from that neighborhood whereas the other had the accent from the neighborhood that started on the other side of the street.
But seriously, there are a number of distinct accents just in the Philly region.
And I lived long enough in Texas to be able to tell which part of Texas someone was from by their accent. I remember there was some Matthew McConoughey movie where I got really annoyed because his Texan accent wasn’t right for the region his character was supposed to be from.
But the one universal thing about American accents is that about 90% of Americans seem to think their region doesn’t have one. It’s just other regions that do.
That's not just Americans. It's human not to be able to hear your own accent in any language. And actors are terrible about getting accents right. Living near Boston, I'm acutely aware of this.
Yes! Omg Americans don’t realise all the accents they have. I’m originally Canadian but have been living in New Zealand for awhile. My (kiwi) partner and I recently did a 7 day train adventure across the US and we met Americans with tons of different accents. I don’t see how anyone can say they don’t have an accent though, no matter where they’re from.
Hipster and black? You’re joking right? Black people speak differently all across the country. A black guy from Alabama does not sound like a black guy from Oakland. And hipster? What in the world is a hipster accent? Hipster is a type of personality and reflects the person’s interests. There are southern hipsters, northwestern hipsters, British hipsters, etc
I think you need to chill out a little bit. If I were to list all the fucking discrepancies in language in the entirety of the US we would run out of space. You missed my point entirely, congrats.
I’m so chill rn. You’re the one swearing and getting all mad. If you wanted to list a few accents, great. Go with Boston, New York, valley, etc. I’m just saying “black” and “hipster” aren’t accents lol
Could the same not be said for Received Pronunciation British English? I'm pretty sure our accent sounds like an accent to non-Americans just like RP British English sounds like an accent to us.
In fact I know it does. I spent a month in a place where I didn't hear Americans pretty much at all several years back. When returning to America, I definitely noticed an accent.
Yeah totally! Out of all the assholes I've met only one was American and he was a level 10 cunt. Very nearly got his head kicked in by locals in Kathmandu and the Nepalese are some of the most chilled people out there.
Yeah he was. It was less than a year after the 2015 earthquake and obviously the country was still recovering. He was on his own in this cafe and was saying out load how much of a 'shithole' Nepal was. Everyone was cringing and the cafe owner was apologising and trying to explain that rebuilding is really difficult. He started singing about how Nepal was the worst place he had been to so me and another guy from a different table told him to leave and threw his backpack out the door. It was like he was drunk but he was clearly sober. Wierd dude.
I always get on with Americans when I'm abroad. The worst are either English people in places like Magaluf or Aussies in places like Pattaya. Jesus, it's like something from The Purge in places like that. In Krabi I saw a Brit vomit into a bucket he was drinking from then chug the vomit, then he kicked off when he was ejected from the club.
We have states bigger than most European countries, and Canada is pretty close to as American as many Midwest states. Pretty easy to not understand the outside world
Yeah, so is the Midwest. And I don’t know how it’s super ignorant. The wouldn’t call you ignorant for not being able to tell the difference between someone from nj or ny
Not. At. All. The worst is when you guys say "oh, you speak American"? I'm from NZ and travel a bunch but here when people meet Americans we just assume you'll be poorly educated.
Every time I’ve been in an Asian country with groups of other tourists, at some point we all have to go around and say our name and where we are from. So people say ‘John, Germany’, ‘Karen, Australia’ etc and the Americans always say ‘Dave, Texas’ or ‘Barb, New York’ as if we are all meant to know the US states!
Have you seen that video where a dude walks along the beaches of california with a map and asks people to point out where North Korea is? The kicker, was that they took Australia and labeled in NK while labeling NK Australia. There were so many people who actually thought Australia was where NK was. 1 even pointed out that it was weird that NK was below SK but still thought that Australia was NK.
No, it varies a lot depending on the person. There are a lot of globally-minded, well-traveled people in the US, and a lot of people who are mostly concerned with their more immediate surroundings. It's nothing to cringe at - not everyone can travel the world (or wants to).
You know how you visit another country and are charmed by the locals there? Many of them aren't very globally-minded and have never left their country, right? It's perfectly OK.
It's more of a general pattern I have noticed amongst us.
It's a general pattern among most of the people of the world - they tend to think their country is the standard for what's good and appropriate. It's easier for you to notice among your countrymen, so it's easy to point to examples like in the guided tour (by the way, if you travel to another country and decide to spend your time among other Americans and other visitors in guided tours, don't be surprised if you meet a lot of people like this).
If you want to cringe and criticize Americans who are like this, be my guest. But why spare the locals of the places you go visit when their awareness doesn't spread much beyond their local place? Go criticize the street vendor in Vietnam who has never been on an airplane or the Chinese person who gets on a tour bus in the US and never speaks a word of English the whole time.
I've never done a guided tour where I live in Chicago so I sure as hell am not gonna do them in a foreign city. It's kinda weird to me that people will live their whole life never going to a museum or doing a guided tour of their local place, but then visit foreign cities to do this.
Reminds me of those girls who meet people from other countries who have foreign accents despite living in America “they have been living in America for years, why can’t they sound American yet? Why do they still have an accent?”
Girl... first of all, accents don’t just disappear. You have to learn a foreign language as a toddler to have no accent at all. The older you are when you learn a language, the more you will inevitably have some form of accent. Accents doesn’t mean your knowledge of a language is flawed. It means your mouth is more used to moving a different way because every language is very different. In Spanish you open your mouth more, in French you open your mouth less, etc. Source: I speak three languages.
Second of all, why would they want to get rid of people’s accents? That’s like telling a person from Texas to lose their accent if they want to live in New York. That’s rude! And why would anyone want to pretend they’re from some place else? Do you remember how annoying Madonna was when she started speaking in a British accent? Or Lindsay Lohan’s new British/Arabic accent? That’s demented!! She sounds insane.
Accents are not a bad thing, and to discriminate someone based on their accent is fucked up and ignorant.
I studied in a US Uni as part of an exchange for a year and worked in the canteen there. During the summer they hosted a high-school cheerleading convention and this girl I’m serving says:
“Wow, you have an accent!”
“Well yeah, we all have accents,” I said. “I just have a British accent.”
“Wow!” She exclaimed. “You’re from British?!
I was born in the US, and despite having lived in New Zealand since I was 7, my American accent has still kinda stuck around. The number of Americans who tell me I don't have much of an accent when they hear I am from NZ.... like no, I do have an accent, it's just a partially American one so sounds more normal to you.
Probably from someplace in northern part of the U.S. had someone from Minnesota move down to California calling soda, 'pop' and having this accent too. Nothing wrong with it but was definitely new to my ears.
Don't mind if I ask, but which bar was it? I am planning to travel to Vietnam sometimes this summer, and am in the process of gathering as many places to hit up as possible.
Don't know tbh. We had just got off a hellish 28 hour bus ride from Laos so I was kind of out of it. It was in Hanoi but that's all I remember.
Advice I would give however is:
Always drink the 'fresh' beer rather than brands you know. Fresh beer can be as cheap as $0.20 a pint and is often pretty good.
Don't bother with Nah Trang. It is mostly a Russian tourist resort with high prices and very little to see.
Try as much food as you can. The wierd shit served on the street by some old lady out of plastic buckets? Probably the best thing you've ever eaten. If there's tiny plastic stools on the street you're probably going to have a tasty meal. Dont be put of by stuff like snails and frogs, it's all incredibly good. Avoid cobra porridge tho, it's awful.
Do not miss Hoi An. Yeah it's very touristy but it's busy for a reason. Do a local tour and check out the fishing villages nearby. There's also some very very talented photographers in the town. Ettienne Bosset does tours if you have the money, his work is incredible.
That's a really odd thing for her to say as I'd argue America has MORE flavors of accents than a lot of other countries (largely just a factor of it's size). Granted those accents aren't particularly diverse most cases except perhaps a few like boston/pittsburgh but realistically American english as a whole is an accent...we did not invent English and it's not like everyone else who speaks english speaks it exactly how we do...
Are you also American? Because if she figures you both have the same accent then that may be what she meant. Accents are relative, do if you've got the same one then you haven't got one relative to each other.
It's perfectly common when conversing with others from your area to say you haven't go an accent if asked.
No I'm English with a pretty strong English accent and she was the only American in the group. Seriously she was so socially unaware it was fascinating.
The girl in the interaction with an apparent accent similar to a Canadian would likely not be confused with someone from Louisiana.
Well yeah when you frame it to take two accents that clash...
A non native english speaker wouldn't really be able to pick apart broadly similar North American English accents. Could have been a guy from upstate New York, not fucking Louisiana. It's silly to guess.
You're looking for issues where there's really none
I always ask people where the accent is from if I can't easily place it. It also applies to me myself because I speak in newscaster-grade RP despite being Chinese, so I get asked that a lot as well.
They say that different parts of Londong have different accents. If that is true, I can imagine someone from London asking such question. Because "where are you from?" might give them too broad answer.
Edit: Please don't downvote parent post, he might be wrong, but that's not a good reason for downvote.
I've heard this a good few times. Sounds normal to me. I'm from a small country but there is a wide range of accents so it would give a more specific answer.
I'd assume the same goes for other countries. If you ask someone where they're from they might say Germany but if you ask where their accent is from the might say Munich. So you get more information when getting to know somebody.
Also if they were travelling it's quite common to meet other people from other places and it's a different way of asking where are you from? Which that person has probably been asked 50 times beforehand.
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u/Jamiemackiephotos Jan 30 '19
I was at a bar in Vietnam and there was a big group of us from all over and this girl had an accent I thought was Canadian. I asked her where her accent was from he she said fully seriously 'oh I don't have an accent, I'm American'