Why do MOST chinese people living in the United States have English accents that are difficult to understand? (restaurants, shop)
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Not to be racist or rude anything, but why is that MOST chinese people living in the United States have English accents that are difficult to understand?
Hmmm, okay, now in all seriousness, I'm not an expert in linguistics, but I have read the theory that the sounds people are used to hearing used in language, and which they then learn to use themselves, are firmly established in the brain at an early age, like in the first few years, maybe even before the age of five. This makes it very difficult, maybe nearly impossible, to learn to speak a new language with sounds not engrained in the mind. The best you can usually do is to approximate the sounds.
This is supposedly the reason that many Japanese pronounce the "l" sound as an "r." I've read that there is no "l" sound in the Japanese language, so Japanese people do not have that sound wired into their brains, and find it very difficult to process the sound and pronounce it.
I'm going to guess that those from many parts of China speak in dialects which do not include some of the sounds you find familiar. This would mean they really are pretty much unable to pronounce those sounds, so they are going to speak English in a way that can only approximate the way Americans speak English, which is going to make their accent sound difficult and unfamiliar to you. If you find many Chinese more difficult to understand than those with other foreign accents, it's probably because many of the other accents commonly heard in the U.S. happen to have similar enough pronunciations to those in English that it's easier for these people to learn to pronounce English words in ways that sound familiar to you.
As a side note, I've found that I often have difficulty understanding people from India. It seems to be more a matter of what syllables get the emphasis rather than the way they pronounce certain sounds. Often, an Indian will arrange the heavy and light emphases on syllables in ways that make the middle of a word get the kind of emphasis I'm used to hearing at the end of a word, and vice versa. This makes it sound as if the words run together, and I myself find this especially difficult to understand. I've never read whether the brain's early acquisition of speech patterns includes the rhythm of the words. I'm guessing that it does, and that those from India may have engrained in their brains' word-processing centers a meter quite different from that which I'm used to. It all seems to be about the sounds wired in at an early age.
as a Chinese American, I can only think of two of my family members with English that is hard to understand, and that is because they were immigrants.
I can usually understand them, however, and I dont find many asian americans with an accent very hard to understand.
I know that Chinese people are a very small minority in the U.S. but how come I never see Chinese shopping at like Wal-Mart or Publix? I don't even see them at Target and I know they are around because I see a lot working at Chinese restaurants.
Where do Chinese people hang out? I travel sometimes and in the cities I've been to, I 've never seen Chinese people. Do Chinese people go out?
Not to be racist or rude anything, but why is that MOST chinese people living in the United States have English accents that are difficult to understand?
I ordered some chinese food today, when I went in to pick it up there was a black lady ordering some food and I could tell she couldnt understand the ladies strong asian accent, I can barely understand it, there were also some people waiting for their food in there with a South American accent and I was thinking how odd that must be to try and understand each other.
I know that Chinese people are a very small minority in the U.S. but how come I never see Chinese shopping at like Wal-Mart or Publix? I don't even see them at Target and I know they are around because I see a lot working at Chinese restaurants.
Where do Chinese people hang out? I travel sometimes and in the cities I've been to, I 've never seen Chinese people. Do Chinese people go out?
now that I think of it, I dont see em out either, I know they all shop at this cultural food market place and at Costco, other than that I havent seem them out.
Not to be racist or rude anything, but why is that MOST chinese people living in the United States have English accents that are difficult to understand?
If you thought this would be "racist" why ask the queation?
How do you know that MOST "Chinese people" have this issue?
How do you know they are all Chinese?
Also, it has nothing to do with the accent, since English may be their( people of Asian decent) second language, they may not have a good command of the language. It has nothing to do with someones accent.
I do have a question for you. Can you explain why a lot of Americans cannot speak English very well and they don't have a accent?
I'm going to assume you mean people who came to the US from a Chinese speaking country in the last few years or so.
English and Chinese are very different languages. The sounds in English aren't that rare, but I think we have more "consonant clusters" than many non-Slavic or non-Germanic languages. I know a French woman who had difficulty pronouncing "turtle." The "ts" and "ng+" like in "Tsingtao" are the only consonant clusters I recall in Chinese offhand, but it's been awhile since I took Chinese so I might be forgetting something. Also our grammar is, for many common expressions, more complicated than Chinese. In Chinese you just say "I now go bookstore" (Wo xianzai qu shudian) rather than "I am going to the bookstore." I don't recall them using definite and indefinite articles much or at all. Chinese is also tonal and English isn't.
Still I don't think Chinese immigrants are harder to understand than any other immigrant who speaks a language in that language family. For example several Burmese languages are, albeit distantly, related to Chinese. My priest is from Burma and has some diffficulty with English.
All western languages and many Asian languages come from the same root, Indo-Aryan. These include Latin based, Arabic, Hindi, etc. Chinese comes from a different root, and it is almost impossible for a native born speaker of Chinese to perfect Indo-Aryan pronunciation. It is equally difficult for us to speak Chinese root languages perfectly, ie Vietnamese, Thai, etc.
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Chinese living in America
