When you're a non-American on this site...

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Actually I do wonder if the way I phrase things is easily understood by non Brits. The syntax of what i write may be weird, even to Southerners.

At least I'm not throwing in colloquialisms like greeting you all with "Ayup! How's you?" Like I would in real life.

I guess as an American I'm guilty of that too. But since I live in a region that always gets mocked for our exaggerated drawl and using words like "Ya'll" all the time I really don't judge how other people speak.

Here in Australia there are people who say "Youse" its you with an se on the end it's even in the dictionary now.

That's pretty cool. I heard that "Ya'll" is also becoming more accepted as an actuall word. It's a shortened combination of the words "You" and "All".

Good, but I already edited my post.

I felt like a hypocrite saying I don't judge how other people speak and then saying something negative about how I think people from London sound. Plus I've never actually met anybody from London I've only heard their accents on TV shows and movies and I bet a lot of it is exaggerated.

It's fine to have opinions about accents. Some accents really annoy people. Sometimes the Australian accent annoys me too because it sounds cockney but then isn't. I don't mind what non-cockney speakers think of the cockney accent. In fact I get annoyed with how Essex girls speak, which is basically a cockney accent but with a rough, aggressive tone to it.

...Some things can really go completely over your head if you're not familiar enough with the laws and the culture. I mean when a conversation turns to disability benefits and the like I usually follow, interested, but don't really say anything 'cause I've gotten the impression that that stuff works very differently in America than in here (not that I really know that well about how it works over here, either) so I keep my mouth shut 'cause I really don't know anything anyway. And I don't even try to talk about politics unless it has to do with something universal like the rights of disabled or women. I mean how could I bring anything to a conversation about American politics when American politicians that I can actually name from the top of my head can be counted with my fingers and I'm pretty sure all are presidents aside from Hillary Clinton (and I'm not even sure if I wrote that one right which kinda tells a lot.)
There's other stuff too of course, like sometimes when people talk about some school or work trouble or something I find it that I can't really relate as much as I'd like to or that I'm clearly missing something since things are done differently here.
And of course, just the culture in general. It seems that some things that are fine here are considered rude in America and the other way around, so some things might just be plain cultural differences.

And no, I'm not complaining about the amount of Americans here, it's pretty natural on a site where the main language is English and the founder might be American as well, I don't know, but I just wanted to point this out 'cause I feel like they might not always take in to account that not everyone here is an American and the differences between them and some other people here might be about culture differences instead of age gap or autistic misunderstandings. Of course, the rest of us are also likely to forget about cultural differences, it's certainly not just Americans, but since they seem to be a majority I used that as an example.

The point is, people, before you accuse someone of being wrong or say "that's not how it goes", check what country or culture they're from (and remember that there are different cultures inside of a same country, too) and if you can't see it, never just assume where someone is from. The world is a huge place so the chances that you're wrong are high.

That's pretty cool. I heard that "Ya'll" is also becoming more accepted as an actuall word. It's a shortened combination of the words "You" and "All".

kl


I know this expression. Someone from Arkansas uses it too. They may add y'all to the dictionary but it'll never be allowed as a Scrabble word as words with apostrophes (such as don't) aren't permitted, nor are hyphenated words.

Every country or region has its own words . If I said I was late for bioscope because the robots were out, then later we had a braai and visited the spaza shop, US folk would be puzzled!

...Maybe you cover this somewhere below, but you don't say in your description what country you're in!! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Why did this turn almost entirely in to a conversation about accents? I meant to talk more about cultural differences and such...



Oops!
I'm from Finland and English isn't even an official language here, so I also have to deal with language barriers sometimes. Like the time when people were talking about almond milk here and I mentioned that I had to use google translate to even know what an almond was, and someone misread it as just google and wondered how I had never heard of almonds. But that was his mistake, not mine.

Because accents are one of the easiest cultural differences to recognize? You say that like we are being off topic and we are not.