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I have no idea what my English sounds like, it might be terrible. Yet, I’d like to quickly point out something in common for some of the non-native in English, especially teachers, that sometimes makes it very difficult for me to concentrate listening. Interestingly enough, some of those issues also hold true for some Israelis .
Take, for example, the usage of the horrible “you know” and “ok”. Here’s a sample from a course I was just in : “so, eh, okay, you know, the term paper is the best, you know, way for you to, eh, show, you know, right?”. Those pauses for “eh” while thinking about the next word are a special challenge. I try to ignore it, but that makes it even more difficult to bare. I try to play with it, counting the number of times “you know” is being used in a sentence and holding a virtual competition, but it doesn’t make it any easier.
I’d also quickly point out that this is also true for some of the native speakers I know who manage to add a few twists. Gladly, it’s not as widespread and is slowly decaying, but it’s still there. “Like” and “as if” can drive me mildly insane.
Okay, just a little, eh, something to, you know, eh, take off, like, my chest. As if.
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mike dunn
| September 21st, 2008 at 12:12 am #
Don’t forget ‘He goes…She goes…’,etc.
Winnie
| September 22nd, 2008 at 12:34 am #
Same case for Taiwanese’s Chinese. Some people repeat 然後 for hundreds of times in a 3-minute speech.
Steve
| September 22nd, 2008 at 3:33 pm #
I had a lecturer in my undergraduate who used “you know” so often that one lecture someone tallied how many times per minute he said it. I don’t recall the distribution graph now but it thereafter made it impossible to listen to the lecture content seriously because you concentrated on the “you know”s. It just made you giggle.
That was an Austrailian university and a native Engish speaker.
Fili
| September 22nd, 2008 at 6:21 pm #
Steve - Yeah, it usually happens with people with very low confidence in their public English speaking abilities or people are totally not self-aware. I haven’t seen it happen this bad for a native speaker, but I guess you get those everywhere.
Winnie - interesting. In Israel it sometimes (rarely, though) happens with the Hebrew “actually” (Be-etzem). Example - “so, actually, you can, actually, understand, that it’s actually not true”.