sufler
Member
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2014
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- Polish
- Home Country
- Poland
- Current Location
- Poland
Hello.
I'm just wondering, do native speakers find it hard to understand dialects/accents of English different from the one they use? And of course I don't mean totally rare dialects spoken in some far-off, inaccessible villages in the woods or highlands, but those kinds of dialects you can hear in popular movies. For instance I'm not a fluent listener in English, but I don't have huge problems understanding shows like Columbo or movies like Back to the Future or Home Alone. But recently I've decided to watch the American classic "Gone with the Wind" in the original version, and it's just brought me down, I couldn't make it! I had to rewind and listen over and over again almost every phrase in that movie just to catch 2 or 3 words of it! I've experienced the same in the western movie "Rio Bravo" when it came to listening one of the characters (nick-)named Stumpy. I think he was lacking a few teeth, so his speech might have been unclear, but it seems other characters in the movie did not struggle a lot to understand him. I think I will never attain that level of fluency to be able to understand even unclear or defected speech : (
I'm just wondering, do native speakers find it hard to understand dialects/accents of English different from the one they use? And of course I don't mean totally rare dialects spoken in some far-off, inaccessible villages in the woods or highlands, but those kinds of dialects you can hear in popular movies. For instance I'm not a fluent listener in English, but I don't have huge problems understanding shows like Columbo or movies like Back to the Future or Home Alone. But recently I've decided to watch the American classic "Gone with the Wind" in the original version, and it's just brought me down, I couldn't make it! I had to rewind and listen over and over again almost every phrase in that movie just to catch 2 or 3 words of it! I've experienced the same in the western movie "Rio Bravo" when it came to listening one of the characters (nick-)named Stumpy. I think he was lacking a few teeth, so his speech might have been unclear, but it seems other characters in the movie did not struggle a lot to understand him. I think I will never attain that level of fluency to be able to understand even unclear or defected speech : (