Trying to speak English...

[rewolf]

Ladies and Gentlemen,
I, as an inhabitant of Baden-Württemberg, a federal state in the very south of Germany, invite you to listen to Günther Öttinger, former prime minister of this federal state.
Maybe his party (conservatives) found him too embarassing as a prime minister - anyway, now we have a new prime minister, and the former one (Öttinger) was elected European Commissioner of Energy (I believe...)

The first few seconds of the video are German: he says that English is THE universal language and that everybody has to be able to understand and speak it. Then you can listen to Öttinger speaking English.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWoya3u6vAM
Understood? Don't believe that he was much better in German. It is so emberassing This man is supposed to represent Germany in the European Union.

[charger105]

Well, it's better than my German !
But then again, I'm not trying to represent people at a German speaking forum.
People in the UK, the US, Australia, Canada(most of it!) etc are just lucky that English seems to have evolved as the accepted International language.

Rgds.

[LEDluvr]

I think it has more to do wiith the fact that for a long time 'The sun never set on the British Empire'. With strategic colonies the world over; North America, South Africa, India, and the 'Orient' it gave the English speaking British a commading presence in international commerce.... so you had to speak the language to get a piece of the action. Who knows, maybe in 50 yrs. our grandkids will need to speak Chinese to 'get ahead'...

[rewolf]

I think it has more to do wiith the fact that for a long time 'The sun never set on the British Empire'....

Agreed. And the USA being world's economic leader for ages sure did help too. Even the Chinese learn English today...
Anybody remember Esperanto?

[LEDluvr]

Anybody remember Esperanto?

I sure do. "The international language of the future".
Only problem was, nobody spoke it.
A cobbeled together 'engineered' language with no real ethnic
or national origin is doomed to failure. Unless they are computer languages.....

[dot matrix]

Anybody remember Esperanto?

I sure do. "The international language of the future".
Only problem was, nobody spoke it.

Not quite. Wikipediea reports that in 1996 there were100,000 to 2 million speakers of Esperanto, including from 200 to 2000 native speakers. That's a bit more than "nobody." There's also a political party pushing to have it used as the official language of Europe, instead of English; since it is politically neutral and much easier to learn than English.

Check out http://esperanto-usa.org/ for signs of an active community.

[LEDluvr]

Okay - 2 million speakers out of a global population of 6 billion people. My mistake.

[retroleds]

Baring the learning of Esperanto by native English speakers(I'm not thinking it is likely), the learning of English is very helpful to non-English speakers. English is like any other market share item, ubiquity has created the standard above many other considerations. And that ubiquity has already given the vast majority of people on the planet a crash course in English. Doesn't matter how many Chinese there are, their impact on the overall world of business, culture, history, music, art and science are too little, too late to ever make Chinese a big part of any world language. And the complexity of Chinese symbols makes writing and deciphering of Chinese text by computers and people nearly impossible. The Arabic-Greek based alphabets are much simpler to handle and write -more than adequate.

Part of the ubiquity of English is underscored by this joke(paraphrased), sometimes told in defense of the American military,:"Why is this meeting being conducted in English? Because if not for the American military, you might be speaking{insert any language but English}. We are from everywhere, we go everywhere.

[LEDluvr]

The Arabic-Greek based alphabets are much simpler to handle and write -more than adequate.

Not to mention more compatible with LCD and LED displays.....

[retroleds]

.... you can listen to Öttinger speaking English.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWoya3u6vAM
Understood? Don't believe that he was much better in German. It is so emberassing This man is supposed to represent Germany in the European Union.

I didn't have any problem with his English(wish the average non-English speaker was this clear,LOL) - then again, my mother is a German emigrant, so I may be processing the guy better than others. Accents are funny, you never can hear your own. Here in the USA, people can fairly accurately tell where a person is from, their gender, age and nationality from their accent and word use. Many a time I have called a black household and heard someone whisper in the background,"it's a white dude."

On the subject of language barriers, is it impolite to ask a person to have a friend who speak better English call back? I had a gentleman calling from Canada recently, and his English had such a(guessing here) Scottish accent, I seriously could not make out more than one word out of 3.

[CompuChron]

You should listen to Nicolas Sarkozy speaking english!
A few weeks ago ,he welcomed Hilary Clinton and said looking at the sky :
"sorry for the time..." He wanted to talk about the weather....Embarassing...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UxL3JBxJRw&feature=fvsr

[rewolf]

You should listen to Nicolas Sarkozy speaking english!
A few weeks ago ,he welcomed Hilary Clinton and said looking at the sky :
"sorry for the time..." He wanted to talk about the weather....Embarassing...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UxL3JBxJRw&feature=fvsr

That's a "venial sin" - in French "le temps" means bother weather AND time(s)

I didn't have any problem with his English...

Mr. Öttinger would be be happy to hear this. Maybe we're just a bit too censorious with him (a typical German attitude). His speech was even in the news and probably every 2nd German has watched the youtube video... the point is that he doesn't even seen to understand what he is reading. Anyway, "sponge over it" - "Schwamm drüber" means: give it a rest, forget about it, it's not that important (I think the term comes from wiping off a blackboard with a sponge).

As for accents - I think this phenomenon exists in all languages. We have it in Germany too, but maybe not as distinct as in the USA.

English accents: I sometimes watch movies in their original langauge. I have no problems understanding British, Australian or South African (like recently Disgrace) productions, whereas in US productions I often have to resort to the subtitles - though this varies a lot. No chance to understand southern dialects (which doesn't necessarily mean movies set in that area, like Down by Law )
Many years ago in Isreal I was talking with a Jewish woman who had spent the first 6 years of her life in Germany (but had forgotten nearly all of her German). She spoke a very clear English (at least for my ears) and I asked her where she came from - New York City, she said. Until then, I had never heard anyone from the USA speaking like that. She told me that this was because she was a) from New York and b) Jewish.

As for the "Scotch Canadian": In my experience it often helps to ask people to speak a little bit slower (you can blame it on the telephone line ). Sometimes it's even enough to speak slower and very clear oneself to make the other do the same. Well, sometimes...