【老外说】英国人听不懂的英国话？

No. I was just speaking to my dad.

Whenever people in my country speak in their native accent, it’s probably quite difficult for people to understand. Though there are some people speak very slowly and very clearly, people in real life don’t really speak like that. So it’s really important to learn how to understand different accents.

Just like what you heard. It totally depends upon the context you’re in. If you’re talking with your family, you just probably speak like slang and kind of relaxed language whereas if you’re in a restaurant, you probably speak a little bit differently, or if you’re speaking policeman.

• context 语境

  
  

I’m not trying to say that they are completely different. But it’s just like when I was learning Portuguese, sometimes people say like slang words, it’s different from when you’re speaking... like slower and more formal language, more like that the English that everybody speaks.

I just said “can you leave that door open?” I didn’t even think... cause I was just asking him to do it. I didn’t really think it would be a problem for you to understand.

But I suppose that whenever people are speaking natively, they don’t really give this much focus upon pronunciation of the words. Because whenever you’re speaking to your parents, you probably don’t pronounce as well as you’re speaking to a native learner or a new learner of mandarin . Because you want that person to understand you.

• mandarin 普通话

  
  

In language, there are like all these subtleties of... like the intonation , the rhythm . And even if the person doesn’t hear every word that you say, they’re very advanced of the language, they know by the intonation by like certain things that you’re saying. So that’s probably the difference between me speaking to my father right now and me speaking to you.

• subtlety 微妙之处

• intonation 语调

• rhythm 节奏

The fact that you can understand what I’m saying right now is a really good sign. Because I’m using a lot of my native accent.

My country is called Northern Ireland. It’s in the west of Scotland. The top of the northern part is part of the UK. So we’re Northern Ireland . And the southern part is called the Republic of Ireland . And that’s why those guys are down there. They are in a separate country, so they have that green white, and orange flag , and the people in the north, we have the flag of the United Kingdom.

爱尔兰—科特迪瓦，世界上最容易混淆的两个国旗。世界上200多个国家，国旗有些相似在所难免。但科特迪瓦和爱尔兰也太相似。颜色一摸一样，只是排列顺序不同，横竖比例不同。上面是爱尔兰国旗，下面是科特迪瓦的国旗，你分清了吗？

Even for us, that’s a difficult accent.

In the UK, there's been a lot of fighting going on. There was fighting traditionally going on between Scotland and England, they wanted to separate. Even up until about two or three years ago, 2015 I think, so three years ago, they held a referendum in Scotland, the referendum was to see if they could break away from the United Kingdom, and have their own country.

• referendum 全民公决

• break away from 脱离开…

  
  

But it was a really crazy thing, because Scotland, I know that they have all this passion, and all this history, but Scotland will not survive on its own. And Scotland needs the United Kingdom as a whole and not just to rely upon itself.

But this is why you have all this kind of language. Traditionally, Scottish people spoke Gaelic . I think this is why they say the words that they say and they have a kind of focus, so it sounds that words that they say are probably influenced by their original language, and that’s probably why we have difficulty in saying it.

• Gaelic（苏格兰的）盖尔语

  
  

I live in Northern Ireland of UK. My province is called Ulster. Because we had a lot of Scottish people that came over, we have a language called Ulster Scots, which is kind of like English but kind of like Gaelic. I think if you come over to the UK,  you will have a really awesome time learning all this stuff.

英国有独特口音的地区包括: 苏格兰、威尔士、北爱尔兰、康沃尔郡、约克郡、诺福克郡。城市口音则有：利物浦、曼彻斯特、布里斯托、纽卡斯尔、伯明翰、贝尔法斯特。不要说外来人听不懂带口音的英式英语，英国自家人也不一定能懂~英国人在看电视的时候，如果听到地方口音特别重的英语，都只能看字幕才能懂。