Most Indians that you run into do well with English and I've gotten used to the accent over the years. It beats working class Yorkshire, which I'm not sure is even modern English.
The joke is if an American is having trouble making himself understood he speaks louder. I think the default for some ESL people is to speak faster. If you're not sure about some of the twisted English constructions, just skip over them really fast.
That sort of works in German; d' lets you slide over exactly what gender a water cooler is.
11 for the coming attractions... The loudest concert I've went to recently was the Dropkick Murphys and while it was loud I enjoyed it. I seldom go to movies at the mainstream theater but it seems they spent a lot of money on the sound system and want to get their money's worth.
Try 'Trainspotting', 'Sexy Beast', or 'The Navigators'. Some of the actors in the first two like Ewan MacGregor, Ben Kingsley, or Ray Winstone can speak standard English but went native for their roles. Ken Loach mainly used native Yorkies in Navigator and for them there's no hope.
I've never seen the original afaik, but Max Max was supposedly dubbed for the US audience since the distributor didn't think people could understand it. The review is also comical. I wonder how many times Buckley ate his words as sequel after sequel was pumped out?
I think that may be overstated. 'Stone' was a 1974 biker movie that preceded Mad Max with several actors being in both. I had no trouble with the dialog in that one.
As long as they stay with one language. I've seen Bollywood movies like 'Monsoon Wedding' where the dialog can switch from English to Hindi to English or vice versa in one sentence. I don't think that's uncommon for upper middle class Indians.
The idea after independence was to make Hindi the official language and phase out English in 20 years. However less than half the country speaks a language related to Hindi so they're officially bilingual.
I don't know if it's completely accurate but I'm reading a book about the Scandinavian countries where the author state if you go to a convention or meeting with Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Finns, and Icelanders the Finns and Icelanders group together and converse in English while the other three muddle along in their mostly mutually intelligible languages.
In high school there was a girl who spoke very rapidly and could be hard to understand. A teacher said it was because her brain worked so much faster her mouth had trouble keeping up, My personal opinion was her brain and mouth weren't connected at all.
I just finished semi-binge-watching a Danish TV series called "Lilyhammer" about a NYC mob underboss that enters witness protection to save his life and chooses Lilyhammer, Norway as his new home.
Sort of a semi-dark comedy. Guy who plays the underboss was in The Sopranos too (Steven VanZandt)... not really an actor, more of a music composer/producer/performer - but, IMHO, quite entertaining in both of his movie roles.
One thing that caught my attention was the mixture of English and Norwegian - which your observation seems to explain.
When I was at a family reunion in Wells, Somerset, UK, I found myself in the village standing next to two local character types talking in what I guess was a local dialect.
To cut to the chase, I could not even begin to understand what they were saying.... And I was *trying*.... and these were my people, so-to-speak.
I lost a portion of my hearing when I was 17, and I had a severe ear infection in both ears caused by allergies to second hand cigarette smoke. My parents were chain smokers and I was sick a lot like that. This particular infection happened over a weekend and I couldn't get to a Dr in time before both ear canals swelled shut. The Dr. had to see me every day for a week to rinse out the infection and clean them out with q-tips, which was so painful I'd cry like a baby just when he'd touch my ears, let alone go to cleaning them. By the 5th day, he finally could see my ear drums and the pain was bearable by that time. After the scabs fell off from the ear drums he told me there was some scarring, but didn't say anything about hearing loss.
During a miss-ent youth in Hawaii, I knew some kids from Algeria who had lived in an apartment building where seven languages were spoken.
This kids would stand around mixing I-don't-even-know-what languages in jokes so that a word in one language sounded like a word in another language.... it all went over my head, but they would laugh their butts off at some of the things they came up with.
I has a similar experience in the military - except for typical incompetent military medical attention.
It was only one ear. When it was all over and the eardrum finally ruptured inwards (MAJOR sense of relief...), it wrapped around the little bones in the ear.
Got back to the doc that had not treated me properly, he snapped his fingers a few times, said "Can you hear that".... "Nope, not a thing...", then he took a look in there and this "Oh SHIT !" expression crossed his face... and I think he knew he could be in trouble over this one..... sent me to a specialist who took a little suction tube and un-stuck the eardrum from the bones and tacked it back in place.
But I do not think I lost any hearing from that one.... because it would have shown up on tests as different results for each ear.
A side "benefit" of the chain saw experience was constant very high pitched tones in both ears......
All-in-all, I'll take the deafness because before that I was constantly tormented by sounds that were above the pitch that most people can hear. Had to quit a perfectly good management trainee job at the local bank because I could hear the ultrasonic emitters for the security system and they practically blew my brains out....
OTOH, this lady who sat right under one of them - and claimed she could not hear anything - had these huge bags under he eyes and dark circles around her eyes - so I have to wonder if there is an effect even though a person cannot hear the sound.
Wookiee, had to be Wookiee... They live in the Mendip Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Google maps might not be doing it justice but I'm missing the outstanding part.
I'm waiting for Netflix to cough up the Lilyhammer second and third seasons. I love how Little Stevie cuts through Norwegian political correctness. Wolf? No problem, let me get my .38.
Norwegian sounds to me like a mixture of English and German, at least Bokmal. I don't think I've ever hear Nynorsk.
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The US series 'The Bridge' was based on the Danish/Swedish 'Bron/Broen' with the bridge being the Øresund Bridge. There are a few references to the problems of not quite understanding each other. The cast itself is mixed and one of the Swedes said she had been on a bus in Copenhagen and heard a teenage girl say 'skumfidus!' It immediately became her favorite Danish word -- marshmallow.
Then there's the problem that Danes can't understand Danish:
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I'm currently watching 'The Killing' that's a remake of 'Forbrydelsen' set in Seattle rather than Copenhagen.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to American creativity when so many movies and TV series are either remakes of US or European films.
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