[Rhadamantis]

As most of you know, I'm brazilian and I know that a lot of brazilian residents in whatever country you live in can't speak English at all. I don't want to be racist here, I just want to complain about some stuff.

Anyways, I'm studying English in a school for foreign students in Vancouver, Canada. Nice city, nice people, nice weather, but one thing always crosses my mind whenever I actually pay attention to people around me...why are there so many japanese, korean and chinese people in here?

I'm dead serious; roughly 60% of the people in my school are japanese, not to mention the random korean and chinese around. Also, so fucking many asians anywhere I go, and in almost every store I go to, the salesperson is, also, asian. And the worst thing is that their English is dreadful. I rarely comprehend what they're trying to say, and most of them carry around an electronic thesaurus to actually succeed in speaking words such as "college" or "breakfast".

I mean, c'mon. I was hoping I'd go to some place where people would help me improve MY English and not the other way around. Correcting a Pizza Hut attendant on how to pronounce the word twenty through the phone was when I reached my limit and I felt I really needed to share this with you guys. It's not tchuenry, God damn it.

The only positive side of this situation: I can assure you that those japanese girls at school are craving for penises away from their hometown.

Now, is it just Vancouver or do these people infest your area too?

[rambus]

Rhadamantis, on 26 September 2009 - 02:08 AM, said:

As most of you know, I'm brazilian and I know that a lot of brazilian residents in whatever country you live in can't speak English at all. I don't want to be racist here, I just want to complain about some stuff.

Anyways, I'm studying English in a school for foreign students in Vancouver, Canada. Nice city, nice people, nice weather, but one thing always crosses my mind whenever I actually pay attention to people around me...why are there so many japanese, korean and chinese people in here?

I'm dead serious; roughly 60% of the people in my school are japanese, not to mention the random korean and chinese around. Also, so fucking many asians anywhere I go, and in almost every store I go to, the salesperson is, also, asian. And the worst thing is that their English is dreadful. I rarely comprehend what they're trying to say, and most of them carry around an electronic thesaurus to actually succeed in speaking words such as "college" or "breakfast".

I mean, c'mon. I was hoping I'd go to some place where people would help me improve MY English and not the other way around. Correcting a Pizza Hut attendant on how to pronounce the word twenty through the phone was when I reached my limit and I felt I really needed to share this with you guys. It's not tchuenry, God damn it.

The only positive side of this situation: I can assure you that those japanese girls at school are craving for penises away from their hometown.

Now, is it just Vancouver or do these people infest your area too?

infest? the only infestation from globalization comes from industrial farming that causes wide spread diseases ( swine flu/ mad cow) and the ease of travel of bugs and such to environments where they have no predators that leads to destroying or harming the different environment where they don't belong
god forbid if people move around because of ease of travel and easir forms of globalization.

you are "infesting north America" as much they are, god forbid if we let blacks and Asian travel.

did an Asian touch you when you where small or something? how are they harming you just because they are Asian? maybe you are harming them, ever think of that?

maybe we also needed to keep all the polish, Italian , Irish and so forth that help found the bases of America to never move.

[Rhadamantis]

I hope that anyone who's not a complete retard might want to reply to this thread.

I don't even think it's worth it to explain myself to Rambus. If anyone who has a brain gets my message wrong, then I'll gladly repair any misunderstanding I might have caused.

[rambus]

Rhadamantis, on 26 September 2009 - 02:57 AM, said:

I hope that anyone who's not a complete retard might want to reply to this thread.

you made it.

[Usiio]

Rhadamantis, on 26 September 2009 - 02:08 AM, said:

Now, is it just Vancouver or do these people infest your area too?

Not really. In our private schools, there is an extremely high population of Chinese pupils, because their rich parents back in China pretty much just find the most expensive school in the UK and ship them off to there for 6 years or so. And then there's the information/technical support phone lines. None of them are English, but I'm assuming these places are probably based in India or something.
Apart from that, most people are pretty easy to understand.

[Deo2]

If you're helping others with their english, doesn't that just help lessen your accent?

I'm sure you get plenty of practice talking slowly to them.

[MrReinhardt]

Quote

industrial farming that causes wide spread diseases ( swine flu/ mad cow)

swine flu has nothing to do with industrial farming since it does not originate from animals

[Fencer of Alexander]

Well, I am an Asian who lives in North American so I think I am uniquely qualified to comment on some points here.

The accent thing is pretty much universal for 1st generation immigrants regardless of where they're from. You'll have a equally hard time understanding an Eastern European who just learned English. Unless you are somehow talented in foreign languages, if you learn to speak a new language after you pass a certain age, you will most likely retain some sort of accent vs when you learned it when you were a little kid.

Despite the linguistic issue, Asians in he US earn the highest income among all other ethnic groups, so I don't think a heavy accent is really that big of an issue . The fact that your average software, manufacturing, and academia practice in technical areas is filled with Asians makes the usage of the word "festering" uncalled for.

[pathwriter]

Columbus, Ohio, has become one of the nexus points of the waves of Somali immigrants (or are they refugees? I don't really pay attention) and my university is fairly well known for its foreign student population. We've had a rather unusual influx of Hispanic immigrants, too. On any given day, I can hear my language being mangled by half a dozen accents. This is not pleasant for someone who has hearing problems and difficulty understanding native speakers, but I persevere. What can be done? I know a bit of Spanish, but I'm fucked for Somali and Chinese.

Either way, the simple truth is that for all that America is used as the world's whipping boy (our President bitched at the UN about this just this past week), people still want to come here and to our northern cousin, Canada. I've lived in places where I didn't even have to call tech support to hear English in a bad Indian accent. I grew up around people who have been in this country for half a century and still speak English with heavy Italian accents because they've never bothered to improve them (that is, they still predominately speak Italian in their day-to-day). It's a reality of living in an immigrant nation. The only thing you can do is grit your teeth and try to puzzle out what the hell people are trying to say. I avoid the telephone, personally, because telephone quality and poor hearing are a truly awful combination if the person on the other hand has trouble with basic words.

[Fencer of Alexander]

If you can understand what these 2 gentlemen are saying.... then accent is not an issue:

[Aleera]

I'm moving to Vancouver.. >.> There's hardly any asian women around here.

[Villainous]

Yeah there are TONS of them around here, then again I work near MIT so thats probably why. My first g/f was half-chinese half-italian, man, you should have seen how hard the chinese side of the family flogged her over grades, of course, she is now PhD in applied mathmatics (I hate math, so you can imagine how that went). Awesome to hear about all the JP in Vancouver tho, wish that was the case here. We get mostly chinese/viet/koreans, not that it matters, they all look pretty good to me.. something about azn chicks they are like universally sharp dressers, I rarely see one looking sloppy.

[firefeng]

There's something about this thread that makes me think of this other thread, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Huh.

[Serataru]

It's pretty fucking rude for one FOB to use the word "infest" when referring to another. Just saying. We're all immigrants to some degree, unless you're native american, that is.

[Kandi_]

Aleera, on 26 September 2009 - 11:09 AM, said:

I'm moving to Vancouver.. >.> There's hardly any asian women around here.

ditto

[Arkley]

A poor choice of words in his opening post indeed, but I can understand why Rhad's a little pissed about it tbh. I doubt it's racism, but rather that he clearly worked long and hard at learning to speak, read and write a highly complex foreign language, then went off to school in Canada in hopes of improving his English while learning there...only to find that most of the other people there haven't bothered to put in even half the effort necessary to string a sentence together before packing up and moving into an English speaking nation. Imagine you spent half your life learning to speak French, then went to Paris hoping to put those final touches on your new language by using it in day to day life, only to find yourself surrounded by other foreigners who can barely struggle out "bonjour" and when they do manage to force out the word, it reaches your ears in an incomprehensible Indian accent.

Well, I'd be pissed at them, anyway.

[Fencer of Alexander]

Arkley, on 26 September 2009 - 12:03 PM, said:

A poor choice of words in his opening post indeed, but I can understand why Rhad's a little pissed about it tbh. I doubt it's racism, but rather that he clearly worked long and hard at learning to speak, read and write a highly complex foreign language, then went off to school in Canada in hopes of improving his English while learning there...only to find that most of the other people there haven't bothered to put in even half the effort necessary to string a sentence together before packing up and moving into an English speaking nation. Imagine you spent half your life learning to speak French, then went to Paris hoping to put those final touches on your new language by using it in day to day life, only to find yourself surrounded by other foreigners who can barely struggle out "bonjour" and when they do manage to force out the word, it reaches your ears in an incomprehensible Indian accent.

Well, I'd be pissed at them, anyway.

Per the op, he has encountered Asians carrying electronic thesaurus - if that's not a sign of commitment towards learning a new language then I don't know what is. There are a large number of native English speakers who would do well to carry said device or use the damm spellcheck before butchering their own language on paper. It's all a learning process and everyone has to start somewhere.

[Serataru]

OP translation: "Fucking foreigners!" -- "But YOU'RE a foreigner too!" -- "Yeah, but I'm the GOOD kind!"
Seriously, fuck off.

Arkley, on 26 September 2009 - 12:03 PM, said:

A poor choice of words in his opening post indeed, but I can understand why Rhad's a little pissed about it tbh. I doubt it's racism, but rather that he clearly worked long and hard at learning to speak, read and write a highly complex foreign language, then went off to school in Canada in hopes of improving his English while learning there...only to find that most of the other people there haven't bothered to put in even half the effort necessary to string a sentence together before packing up and moving into an English speaking nation. Imagine you spent half your life learning to speak French, then went to Paris hoping to put those final touches on your new language by using it in day to day life, only to find yourself surrounded by other foreigners who can barely struggle out "bonjour" and when they do manage to force out the word, it reaches your ears in an incomprehensible Indian accent.

Well, I'd be pissed at them, anyway.

I lol'ed at the bolded part. Seriously? Portuguese to English? All you're learning is a new way to pronounce and arrange the same fucking letters you do now, with a FEW adjustments, and a couple of different pronunciations. That's like saying it's hard for English speaking people to learn German. Come on now.

His native language uses the same alphabet ours does (for the most part.) Asians have to learn a completely different alphabet first, then learn a language. Asians, young OR old, have a much harder deal when taking English upon themselves than this little faggot did. He wants to get all high and mighty about learning English, but guess what -- Lokky did too (his native is Italian) and his English after ONE YEAR of being in the US has improved twenty-fold, at the LEAST. English doesn't take YEARS of practice to learn when you're just using the same letters to make the same sounds (or similar sounds but say different words.) Lokky also has a bachelor's in Japanese (he's working on a more useful one now, Math, haha) and he'd like to point out that learning Japanese is no small feat for those who are not Asian, either, for the same reason. All you're learning is a new way to pronounce and arrange the same fucking letters you do now. That is NOTHING compared to when you have to learn a completely new set of symbols.

Try coming at English when all you know is thousands of ideograms, or a completely different alphabet entirely, and then we'll see how big you talk.

Also he doesn't really mention this, but he is YOUNG, and when you're young it's easier to learn new languages. It is more difficult for older people to learn a new language. My great grandparents came to the US when they were already old. Neither one of them spoke English the day they died. They tried, but really all they knew was the essentials. Where's the bathroom, etc. It is common knowledge that older folks have a harder time learning new languages. This shit is straight out of Developmental Psych, hello 100 level class? People shouldn't need to be told this shit. They still worked hard, paid taxes, and were good citizens. Take your racist banter somewhere else. "Infest" -- your word choice needs work, foreigner. I really hope someone treats you the way you're talking down about others, it would do you good to get a little humility.

Fencer of Alexander, on 26 September 2009 - 12:18 PM, said:

Per the op, he has encountered Asians carrying electronic thesaurus - if that's not a sign of commitment towards learning a new language then I don't know what is. There are a large number of native English speakers who would do well to carry said device or use the damm spellcheck before butchering their own language on paper. It's all a learning process and everyone has to start somewhere.

So much truth. Honestly op, you're being a douche.

[Arkley]

Quote

It's all a learning process and everyone has to start somewhere.

You seem to be missing the point I was making; A school in an English speaking nation is not an appropriate place to "start" learning. They may be dedicated to learning the language and that's great, but they should have put in the effort before going there, much like he did. If you still have to rely on a computer to translate and say certain words in English for you, then in my opinion, you have no business being in any English speaking nation as anything more than a tourist. Now then, if you've got the basics down, you can string together your sentences and don't need a digital assistant to pronounce two syllable words, fantastic, go on over and learn the rest.

He may have expressed it clumsily, but his frustration with these people is understandable. His Asian schoomates may indeed have valid reasons for not being fully capable of speaking English, such as those Sera expressed, but that doesn't mean it's any less frustrating for him.

[Fencer of Alexander]

Arkley, on 26 September 2009 - 12:22 PM, said:

You seem to be missing the point I was making; A school in an English speaking nation is not an appropriate place to "start" learning. They may be dedicated to learning the language and that's great, but they should have put in the effort before going there, much like he did. If you still have to rely on a computer to translate and say certain words in English for you, then in my opinion, you have no business being in any English speaking nation as anything more than a tourist.

He may have expressed it clumsily, but his frustration with these people is understandable. His Asian schoomates may indeed have valid reasons for not being fully capable of speaking English, such as those Sera expressed, but that doesn't mean it's any less frustrating for him.

I disagree with you on the usage of computers. It is a perfectly valid tool to use, but I concede that without combining it with actual "English" interaction with human beings it is not as effective, but whatever.

It is a little bit hard in my opinion to generically state that someone with a less than perfect diction has not put in the effort. A foreign grad student from a non-English speaking country must take the TOEFL test before coming here (which you can't really nail by just memorizing words). The US citizenship, last time I checked, is in English and requires an interview/oral examination stage. To be able to succeed professionally in Engineering, Academia, or other fields frequented by Asians require that they have a good command of the language. Since the demographic data clearly shows that Asians are the "immigrant success stories" of the 20th century, then imo the original rant is really driven by the "dislike of Asian accents" rather than by the actual comprehension of what they're saying.