Languages

:rofl:
This reminds me of the type of humour I have with my British friends when we're drunk. Good video, but there's a shitload of product placement for Eastern European brands. :lol: There's Polish Krupnik and Żubrówka vodkas, and (obviously) Russian Русский Стандарт vodka. There's also Polish Żubr and Tyskie beers.

 

Necrobump for the lulz

 

wow such r00d

Jokes aside, this reminds me.... are we ever going to do the skype thing? :lol:

 

what?

 

I mean, sure. PM me your skype.

 

Upon finding the post to explain this to you, I realized that Darkbringer initially wrote:

I came up with the idea of a group Skype call after this. So if anyone prefers Darkbringer's original idea we could do that instead. What do yous think?

 

I'm up for whatever.

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17561342/Abdul Question Final.mp4
tell me what my accent is like please!

 

I'm no expert on US accents, but it sounds like fairly neutral American to me. In British English there is Received Pronunciation, which sounds much more upper class and is spoken in the south of England (it's how many people who have never been to England perceive all Englishmen speaking). Your accent sounds like the RP of American English, though as opposed to RP (which I dislike), I actually think that standard American accent sounds ok.

I probably got it completely wrong though.

 

I've heard from multiple people that I don't really have any type of accent. I just speak words in a very neutral type of way.

 

I don't hear an accent in your voice. You do however, like you said, have a neutral voice; not monotone though. It's more of a calm voice.

 

Us Americans kind of have a few unique accents (notably East Coast cities like Boston and New York, or general southern drawls), but I'm not hearing a hint of any of those. You would hear that same accent in about 80% of the country. I'm assuming you live in some kind of at least decently well developed area, since even up north here a few rural areas sound more "southern". Very textbook example of English.

 

I speak Spanish (and English, obviusly), but I don't think there are a lot of Spanish people here.

 

I do speak spanish, but i have to admit it's not really my favourite language.

 

I can speak/write broken Spanish, read a decent amount of Spanish, and understand almost no Spanish in conversation (due to accents and the fact that it's typically spoken very quickly).

 

I love English. I don't really like Spanish.

 

After a trip to Bratislava (capital of Slovakia), I can update my impressions of the Slovak language... it is EXTREMELY similar to Polish, to some extent our languages are mutually intelligible. I have never before studied or tried to learn Slovak and I didn't know anything from this language except for a few basic phrases I memorized that would come in handy for a tourist, but walking around the streets of Bratislava I found it very easy to understand whole sentences of people's conversations (though not everything, as it is still a different language). Reading and pronunciation is just as easy. Whenever I needed to ask a local for something, I generally found it much easier to speak with them using Polish than English. If a native Polish speaker moved to Bratislava, I think they'd find it quite easy to learn the language in a matter of weeks. Apparently the dialects near the border with Poland are even more similar.

Language talks aside, I found Bratislava a very nice and cozy place for a capital city with very friendly and hospitable people. Obviously, my impressions are mostly limited to the central section of Bratislava and I didn't have time to visit the supposedly grittier part of the city across on the other side of the river. However, generally speaking, it felt very much like a poorer and smaller Warsaw. It was strange because the language, culinary traditions, architecture, atmosphere and practically everything else is so similar to that of Poland that Slovakia felt almost like home. Though one urban difference I noticed between Bratislava and Warsaw is that in the former it is antifascist and left-wing graffiti/stickers that dominate walls, rather than the more right-wing and often racist graffiti/stickers of the latter.

Why?

 

Since I suck at speaking the language, I too don't really like Spanish all that much. What I really do enjoy, since for some reason I understand it perfectly, is hearing other people speak Spanish simply because it has a very lively pitch and flow to it, unlike English. The Spanish language has single-words that, if translated into English, would have to be extended into a short sentence just to try to explain that one word -although, I think every language besides English has those 'special words' that can explain an entire action in a single term. I also think that most jokes in Spanish are funnier.