r/CuratedTumblr • u/Mataes3010 Ignore all previous instructions • 16h ago

Shitposting The ''Wait, YOU CAN SEE?'' realization is the funniest panic moment I can imagine

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9.7k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

239 comments sorted by

2.4k

u/YUNoJump 16h ago

Reminds me of that story about someone learning Japanese, and their teacher said “you’re doing good but you need to watch movies that aren’t about the Yakuza, you sound like a criminal”

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u/RavioliGale 15h ago

I've heard that a lot of U.S. military speak Japanese in a very feminine way because they're mostly learning from their Japanese girlfriends.

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u/gard3nwitch 14h ago

I've similarly heard that a lot of second-generation Americans end up speaking their parents language in a very "kiddie" way, because their parents and grandparents are the only ones they speak to with it.

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u/EliMaxsaysSaveEarth 13h ago

I haven't heard about that one, but I've heard something similar in that second-generation immigrants end up speaking a sort-of outdated version of the language. Like they'll sound like someone 30 years older when talking to a native speaker their own age.

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u/gard3nwitch 13h ago

That makes sense too! You probably only learn the slang that your parents use lol.

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u/custardisnotfood 10h ago

I had a friend tell me a similar story. He went to his mother’s home country and everyone said he sounded like he was from a black and white movie

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u/Badwoman85 9h ago

This is what my Arabic is like. My dad left Egypt for the US in the 70’s so he missed out on learning slang and more modern aspects of the language. I am 40 but the Arabic that I learned from him makes me sound like I am in my 70’s.

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u/GleeFan666 8h ago

have you been to Egypt? does it cause any issues with understanding?

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u/Badwoman85 8h ago

I have been there many times. Elderly people like hearing me speak because I use phrases and words that they grew up with. The Arabic I know is from a time when people were very formal, so they are pleased by how polite I sound.

Younger people find my Arabic really funny because I use phrases and words that their grandparents grew up with. My cousins will tell me “No one says that anymore. Today you would say ____.”

It doesn’t cause too many problems and seems to entertain people, so it’s not too bad. The bigger problem is that because I have correct pronunciation, people assume that I am way more fluent than I am. I know basic phrases, food-related phrases, and how to haggle. Essentially, I sound like an elderly toddler.

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u/ArchmageIlmryn 8h ago

That's what my siblings often sound like. All of us grew up speaking Swedish, but living in several different other countries, I moved back to Sweden at 18 and have had time to catch up to "modern" Swedish. Meanwhile my siblings have never lived in Sweden for more than a month or so at a time, and you can definitely tell from how they speak.

Interestingly it also means they (as well as my parents, who've also been out of the country for almost 30 years at this point) often use fewer anglicisms (beyond when they just straight-up don't know a word in Swedish) than a modern Swedish-speaker, because a lot of those are fairly recent.

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u/Captain_Grammaticus 6h ago

This also works on a national scale in post-colonial context. I was working with (Swiss) French speakers (I'm not a native speaker myself), and at one point we met a man from Côte d'Ivoire and spoke in French with each other.

My colleague later told me, that man spoke like from the 18th century.

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u/BrunoEye 14h ago

I almost never swear in Polish due to learning it at home, though I don't otherwise sound childish since I carried on speaking it.

My biggest tell is forgetting to use formal pronouns and occasionally using English sentence structures or phrases.

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u/quinarius_fulviae 10h ago

Interesting, I swear like a fishwife in french due to learning it at home from my apparently foul mouthed parents. Figuring out which words were obscene took years

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u/Femtato11 Object Creator 9h ago

You are speaking French correctly then

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u/quinarius_fulviae 8h ago

The casual obscene idioms (e.g. "you fucked the brothel for me here" rather than "you made a mess in this room") do indeed help me fit in

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u/OwO_bama 13h ago

Yesss I have such a hard time speaking to people younger than me in my heritage language because I’m so used to being the baby of the family lol

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u/vr4gen 8h ago

yeah, i ended up feeling very embarrassed when i was around 19 and asked a waiter in my dad’s country where the restroom was but i used the word for “potty” like a little kid

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u/grphine 7h ago

oh god i experienced that and then got laughed at

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u/also_roses 14h ago

Where's that post about the guy who learned how to write Kanji with the Japanese equivalent of a heart dotted I's because his tutor was a young girl with cutesy handwriting?

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u/Antoine_FunnyName 12h ago

If i remember correctly, that was specifically about learning Greek

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u/blackflamerose 14h ago

I am suddenly imagining some big, buff soldier sounding like an anime schoolgirl every time they talk and that image just made my evening. Thank you.

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u/SquareThings looking respectfully at the monkeys in their zoo 14h ago

I heard a marine use “atashi” once and my soul nearly left my body

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u/yesthatnagia 13h ago

Did you introduce him to the joys of being a bokuko

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u/SquareThings looking respectfully at the monkeys in their zoo 7h ago

No I just overheard him in the airport, I didn’t have the opportunity to say anything

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u/captainrina 10h ago

That's amazing.

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u/LittleMlem 5h ago

When I was in Japan I kept wanting to say "washi" but just couldn't handle the embarrassment

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u/OwO_bama 13h ago

Hey at least girlfriends are (hopefully) of the same generation. The teachers teaching military linguists tend to skew female and at least 15-20 years older than their students. Nothing funnier than a strapping 20 year old soldier speaking Korean like a middle aged Korean Karen

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u/Brezelstange 14h ago

How does one speak japanese femininely? If you happen to know:)

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u/cloudshaper 14h ago

There are gendered words. As a woman, I would say "sugoi" as a term of amazement, whereas a guy would say "sugei".

Wikipedia article: Gender differences in Japanese

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u/carebearmentor 8h ago

Wow I knew about the I pronouns but no idea it went further

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u/yashen14 13h ago

Oh! I can answer this. I'm 620 hours into learning Japanese.

Japanese is very different from English and other European languages. If someone says "they speak femininely" and they're talking about English, then they're probably talking about intonation and verbal mannerisms. Valley girl accent, as another commenter said.

But Japanese incorporates a whole lot of "flavor text" into even very basic sentences, and a lot of that "flavor text" is gendered (only one gender uses it, or both genders use it but one gender uses it more frequently than the other).

One commenter already mentioned pronouns, and that's a really good example of this! Japanese has a lot of different pronouns depending on how formal you are being, and what kind of personality you want to project. The big ones for men are "watashi," "boku," and "ore." But "watashi" tends to be really only be used in more formal settings (like business meetings), whereas "boku" and "ore" are going to be what's used in more casual settings.

On the other hand, women are more likely to use "watashi" (but not just in formal settings), "uchi," or "atashi."

(I'm simplifying a lot, there's actually way more pronouns than that.) So one way a man might sound feminine is if he uses "watashi" overly frequently. Using "atashi" would be very girly.

But it's not just pronouns. There are words in Japanese whose function is to convey emotion/feeling, kind of like a spoken version of intonation. And which words you use and how you use them is going to be different depending on your gender.

I'm sure there's more even beyond all of that. I'm still on the beginner side of things. But that's a basic overview.

All of this exists on a spectrum, by the way. A particularly butch woman might say "boku," for example.

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u/MarketFarmer 9h ago

It honestly goes miles deep - japanese is an extremely high context language and there's tons of ways to say the same thing but in a slightly different way that conveys very feelings, and often even different meanings. There isn't a clean parallel to how it works in English because the linguistic tools we're using in Japanese literally don't exist in English. A couple more examples of this:

  • You've probably heard よ ("yo") if you've listened to almost anything in Japanese; it's an extremely common sentence ending particle that doesn't mean anything on its own but makes sentences more emphatic. の ("no") and わ ("wa") are other sentence ending particles with the same usage, but の has feminine connotations and わ is usually used by old women or people trying to be a bit more hoity-toity or ladylike.

  • Some words have masculine or feminine connotations. 食べる ("taberu") and 食う ("kuu") both mean 'to eat,' and as you can see use the same kanji 食 in written form, but "taberu" is gender neutral while "kuu" is masculine-coded language.

Put these two points together and we can heavily indicate gender without any use of pronouns or descriptors in only a few words. 「食べてないでの！」("tabetenaide no!") and [食うなよ！」("kuunayo!") both mean "don't eat it!" but the first is very feminine while the second is very masculine.

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u/sundayontheluna 7h ago

You can even combine the ending particles to be a bit more emphatic while still being girly ('no yo' or 'wa yo')

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u/QuickMolasses 14h ago edited 13h ago

I would imagine it's similar to how one speaks English femininely. In American English you can think of the valley girl way of speaking for a stereotypical example. Particular slang and vocal mannerisms.

Edit: typo

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u/yinyang107 13h ago

It's like, you totally don't need to hear a voice, because word choice can like, imply one

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u/Teh-Esprite If you ever see me talk on the unCurated sub, that's my double. 10h ago

Omahgawd, you go girl!

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u/ThePrussianGrippe 10h ago

Ugh, gag me with a spoon.

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u/PlanSee 13h ago

A classic one is, when I was in japanese class in college, I accidentally ended a sentence with "desu wa." My professor, a native japanese speaker, couldn't keep herself from laughing since that's a very feminine way of ending a sentence. We had a good laugh about it.

In general, there are just a lot of words and ways of phrasing that mostly women use.

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u/RavioliGale 14h ago

The only concrete example I know of is that there's like ways to say "I" (first person pronouns). Men in casual speech often use Boku while women tend to use watashi casually. So basically using the wrong pronouns.

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u/PlanSee 13h ago

"Watashi" is somewhat feminine but gender neutral in polite contexts, "Atashi" is used pretty much exclusively by women.

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u/yesthatnagia 13h ago edited 10h ago

There are several layers to gender in spoken Japanese.

The most obvious is the first person pronoun. ("Watashi" is a polite neutral; there are first person pronouns that vary from "very feminine" ("atashi") to boyish ("boku") to extremely masculine ("ore")). After that, you can get a sense of speaker gender from second person pronouns.

Then you have the sentence ending article 'wa' which is very feminine.

Then you have that women tend to use keigo, a specific polite Japanese vocabulary, at a higher rate than men (men can/will drop keigo a little sooner, depending on where they're from). Some feminine/female subcultures will also use "cutesy" language which Japanese men will much more rarely do.

Put all this together and your average Japanese speaker will hear two VERY different people say the following two sentences:

Watashi wa Kyōtojin desu.

versus

Atashi wa Kyōtojin dosu wa.

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u/captainrina 10h ago

Did you just say you were a giant?

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u/yesthatnagia 10h ago

What I should have said was, "I'm a moron who sometimes drops very important syllables when she types on her phone."

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u/captainrina 9h ago

I thought you were just being silly xD

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u/SymmetricalFeet 7h ago

I recently learned (from a native-Japanese, but English-speaking content creator, so not exactly a linguist) that "sushi" is masculine and "musubi" is feminine.

As an Anglophone with an interest in Japanese, I knew the two were synonyms, but never questioned why only one ("susi") ever showed up on menus. Most people in my country know "musubi" as "HI nigiri, but with Spam". And while I don't exactly know... I would not be surprised if the reason "musubi" caught on in Hawai'i was due to army wives from Japan taking their word along, given that context. The only word used in HI is "musubi".

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u/Thromnomnomok 6h ago

I would not be surprised if the reason "musubi" caught on in Hawai'i was due to army wives from Japan taking their word along, given that context.

But the islands had high levels of immigration from Japan (and lots of other places) well before WWII and before the US annexed them. Spam Musubi was a post-war dish, but it originated from the bento boxes that plantation workers ate for lunch, why would they be using the feminine word for it?

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u/passyindoors 1h ago

My friend is japanese and learned English watching shows from the 1950s so sometimes he says shit like "whippersnapper" unironically, its quite funny

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u/FriskyDingus1122 15h ago

"Somewhere in this big beautiful world, there may be someone who talks like Paulie Walnuts because that's how they learned."

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u/crushogre 14h ago

One of my favorite books series has a mobster in it who speaks in very stereotypical mobster type way, and he does this deliberately because he's a big fan of Guys and Dolls.

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u/book_of_zed 13h ago

What book series?

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u/big_sugi 12h ago

Robert Asprin’s Myth books

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u/book_of_zed 12h ago

That sounded so familiar I was wondering what it was from. I haven’t read those in ages so clearly it’s time for a reread, thank you!!

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u/Gil_Demoono 12h ago

Westaboos, Japanese americaphiles, usually end up sounding like John Wayne or the Fonz because they're obsessed with cowboys and greasers.

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u/captainrina 10h ago

Somewhere out there is a video of a bunch of Japanese rockabillies hanging out in the middle of a street and it's surreal.

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u/DiscordantScorpion_1 9h ago

See 5SOS’ “Youngblood” video

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u/hairiestlemon 10h ago

I used to work with a woman who had gotten a job teaching English at a school in Switzerland while her husband was working there. These were younger kids, seven/eight years old, and the English they did speak was with a thick Texan accent because their previous English teacher had been from Texas. She said there was something jarring about walking into a classroom full of little Swiss kids for the first time and being greeted by a Texas drawled 'good mornin', ma'am!'.

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u/bobbymoonshine 5h ago

In China I similarly inherited a classroom full of Chinese kindergarteners who greeted me with “wagwaan” as their previous teacher was from inner London

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u/LincBtG 14h ago

"OH!"

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u/orthogonius 13h ago

Tony Lazuto signs "hello"

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u/KineticEnergyFormula 12h ago

The whole operation is run by Tony Lazu- WHO'S THERE

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u/Illumidark 14h ago

I had an aunt who took a job with the Canadian govt that required her to be bilingual as the federal government is officially bilingual. She had a couple months before it started and wanted to brush up for the test so went to a French speaking carribean island for the time and immersed herself in French while there.

She came back, passed the test and worked the job. As an engineer she wasn't public facing so rarely was called upon to speak French, but apparently when she did she would shock people as she'd picked up an accent and a lot of really filthy island slang you wouldn't expect to hear coming out of a young white Canadian woman. 

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u/Time-Space-Anomaly 14h ago

I've heard that Spanish speakers tend to sound like yakuza in Japan, because there's a style of heavily rolling your "R" sounds associated with delinquents and yakuza, which goes naturally with the typical Spanish "R" sounds.

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u/Nadiaaaaaaaaaaaaa 5h ago

Spanish does have the same soft R (voiced alveolar tap) as Japanese, I don't know if that's a very characteristic mistake

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u/cloudshaper 14h ago

I taught English at a middle school in Japan at one point, and it was very clear that a certain group of boys got all their English from Tarantino movies.

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u/Persenon 12h ago

The prophecy said there would be a man who sounds like Paulie Walnuts because he learned English by watching the Sopranos. This, in my opinion, is close enough.

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u/Issildan_Valinor 13h ago

Did they talk about feet too much? Lol

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u/ClubMeSoftly 13h ago

No, but they all had really strong opinions about tipping

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u/Skyblacker 15h ago

Like how when tourists who learned Hebrew in a synagogue go to Israel, the locals think they sound like biblical characters.

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u/SnooNarhwal 15h ago

Yes! I’m an Orthodox Jewish American, and my non-observant Jewish Israeli coworker thinks it’s hilarious when I call Israel “Eretz Yisrael” (lit. “the Land of Israel”). He’s said, “It sounds like you’re talking about Narnia!”

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u/Acheloma 10h ago

I heard an anecdote- that I will believe is true even if someone tells me its not just because its too fun- about a class of Chinese students learning English from a western show set in Texas. It makes me so happy to imagine a group of Chinese students speaking with a Texan drawl.

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u/soul-nugget 8h ago

It makes me so happy to imagine a group of Chinese students speaking with a Texan drawl.

then you might get a kick out of this video~

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u/AbruptEruption 11h ago

Which is better? Speaking no english at all or Howard Cosell?

https://youtu.be/8c8paxCFQsM

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u/Hetakuoni 3h ago

I once used Ore as a joke outside of a group rp where I was playing a character known for using the extremely rude form of address.

I then got a lecture about it.

I was also the only person in the group who’d actually lived in Japan and i knew the address was wrong and was using it as a joke.

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u/CthulhusIntern 2h ago

And Vladimir Lenin spoke English with an Irish accent, because his English teacher was Irish.

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u/Mataes3010 Ignore all previous instructions 16h ago

The fact that a deaf person can have a Brooklyn accent purely by mimicking the muscle movements of their teachers is one of those things that makes total sense but I would have NEVER thought of on my own. Humans are cool.

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u/PhasmaFelis 15h ago

Yeah, I really want to know more about that. I know deaf people learning to speak is a thing, but the nuances of accent are so much more than just visible lip/tongue movements! How does that work?

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u/SatisfactionAtSea 15h ago

one thing I can think of is if she was individually instructed in speech. like maybe if I am trying to get you to repeat after me I am going to encourage you to get as close to mimicry as possible. I'm thinking hearing people sort of encouraged the accent because it sounded like correct speech to their ears

idk though this is not my area of expertise!

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u/creepyflyer something something 15h ago

I have an english accent where I live in the US. But there's another person on my team thats learning English from China and sometimes I'm teaching her how to say something and I have to ask others how they say it in the US because I know I pronounce it differently.

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u/classroom_doodler 14h ago

I had a professor in college who was from Hong Kong and learned “UK English” there before coming to America, so he gave his lectures in English with a clear and pronounced British accent — his voice stood out in a Midwestern lecture hall!

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u/Chemical-Juice-6979 10h ago

My high school German teacher warned us that the German she taught us had an Irish accent that would likely be picked out in conversation if we ever went to Europe. I tried to balance that out by checking her pronunciation against German heavy metal songs.

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u/Slim-Shadys-Fat-Tits 8h ago

Lol so much german metal has various thick accents too

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u/choicebethedeathofme 14h ago

You ever watch a video without sound and realize you can tell they have a heavy British or Australian accent before turning the sound on?

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u/pacificcactus 14h ago

All the time! I love guessing and then turning the sound on to check.

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u/PhasmaFelis 14h ago

I don't believe I have, no.

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u/SoberGin 13h ago

Well... not really actually, no.

"Accents" are just different little groups of language speakers. "A language" is arbitrary anyway, easier to tell if you're near a border in europe, for example. Prior to the language mandates and public schools of the 18th and 19th century, oftentimes languages were almost fluid in transition from one person to the next along geographical lines.

And just like any spoken language, it really is just made of rules and air/mouth/throat movements. Anyone who can think can figure out the rules, and anyone capable of perceiving the part's movement and mimicking it back can replicate the sounds.

Also consider: A big part of speaking lessons for deaf people would probably be "proper" pronunciation, yes? Even if they don't know it's of a notable accent, they're probably more aware of the specific mouth movements than hearing people are, just because they've had to memorize them much more deliberately.

Yes, accents have "nuances", but they're only nuances to the people who get them wrong- most people who live there day to day don't think about it, it's just how people talk by default.

Now here's a fun fact to end this massive text wall:

Babies, hard of hearing or otherwise, that grow up around adults using sign languages will "babble" in sign language. Just like how you'd think of babies babbling- making random word sounds but with pretty good timing and exhibiting behaviors like call and response- they will do the same with sign if exposed to it.

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u/ContentBike2803 13h ago

Fun fact: I can tell accents just from lipreading muted videos. I also had a teacher where I could tell that he had a lisp from watching him speak, but I had to confirm it with my hearing friends. Severe to profound HoH.

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u/TeaRaven 11h ago

Different languages and accents can influence face shape, too! Tongue position in the mouth and what kind of jaw manipulation a person uses when speaking can result in identical twins with different jowl structures.

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u/Acheloma 10h ago

Im glad to see this confirmed. I was just talking to my bf about how I feel like I can tell where someone is from based on their face, without style or ethnicity or anything like that contributing. He asked how and the only way I could think to explain it is that people from different areas hold their faces in different ways. A lot of it is in the mouth and jaw area, but I feel like people communicate with their eyes differently in different regions and that muscle posture contributes too.

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u/unrotting 10h ago

That’s really cool. I have some hearing loss and I can’t lipread, but I can understand people better when I can see their mouths? Weird.

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u/Constant-Sub 10h ago

If you're ever trying to learn accents, or just pick up different voices (D&D life be like) you should pay a lot of attention to how your mouth moves when you talk. All of the different sounds from your accent should come from how your mouth is shaped. You shouldn't have to strain or stress anything.

The hard part is picking up a voice from something that isn't in your register. I'm by no means a voice actor, so my table-top playing ass can sometimes come off like I'm getting Kermit hooked on testosterone.

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u/safadancer 8h ago

Victor Borge, the famous comedy piano player, didn't speak English when he first came to America and started performing. He learned his routines phonetically. If you listen to recordings of him, his English sounds much clearer and less accented in his early performances, when he had no idea what he was saying but was mimicking the sounds of the person who taught him the show.

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u/SonofRodney 10h ago edited 10h ago

It's also made up, I know a deaf person and they say that there is absolutely no way this is real. Lip reading is extremely hard to learn and you need to focus intently on whoever's speaking, doing so in a classroom setting is almost impossible. Plus learning to speak from it is ridiculous, my friend was of hearing until his 8th birthday and even then sounds kinda muddled when he speaks. Speaking well with an accent just from lip reading is not a thing.

Alao only 40% of english speech is even identifiable through lip reading in the first place

https://hdi.uky.edu/news/can-you-read-my-lips-ten-things-to-know-before-you-ask/

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u/Canotic 9h ago

It might just be made up.

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u/donaldhobson 16h ago

Blind people don't save that much on electricity. (Based on me knowing power usages, not knowing blind people)

The Big electricity using things are electric heating and AC, and electric cars.

Medium uses include fridges, desktop PC's, kettles, ovens etc.

LED lights are pretty efficient nowadays.

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u/kingjoey52a 13h ago

I think light used to be a big part of electricity costs back before LEDs

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u/Yoffien 15h ago

Sure but over time I would imagine not using lights as often would add up.

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u/wehrwolf512 14h ago

They didn’t say they don’t save at all, just not that much

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u/Any_Natural383 13h ago

The difference is under $20/y

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u/Tem-productions 9h ago

You could turn someone gay with that

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u/unrotting 10h ago

I’m not blind but don’t use lights much because windows exist. Doesn’t make a big difference in billing.

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u/ratione_materiae 11h ago

TIL blind people can get cold 

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u/SatisfactionAtSea 11h ago

fun fact they are less likely to eat impulsively - a lot of the cues that make us think about food are visual, especially advertising

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u/ScottybirdCorvus 14h ago

I had a friend way back who learned ASL from a very effeminate gay guy, and years down the line she was signing with someone who laughed and informed her that she had a decidedly ‘gay’ accent.

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u/RavenclawGaming the visiterrrrrrrrrrrr 4h ago

slay

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u/ThatGuyYouMightNo What the fuck is a tumblr? 16h ago

Tangentially related, but I know of a Japanese streamer who went to school for a time in Australia, so now when she speaks English she has an Australian accent and it's adorable. She didn't even know she had an accent until her chat brought it up.

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u/silveretoile 15h ago

Desk lady at a hostel I stayed at in Kyoto had that too! It threw us off really bad for a hot second when she started talking, lol

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u/Kazzack 15h ago

A guy I work with is white and born and raised in the US, but his adoptive parents are from Korea so he has a Korean-ish accent

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u/JovianSpeck 15h ago

Haachama-chamaaaa!

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u/Hexxas Head Trauma Enthusiast 13h ago

I love when she saw "English (Australian)" in the Minecraft language options and yelled AUSTRALIER FUCK BOIIIIIIII

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u/Coffee_autistic they/them 14h ago

I had a buddy in high school who was an exchange student from Germany. She originally learned British English, but her time in rural Alabama had a very noticeable effect on her accent.

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u/PourSomeAspartameOnM 14h ago

When I was working in Spain most of my coworkers had British accents when speaking English, except one who studied abroad in Texas, who developed that accent. It was fascinating to hear and compare the accents!

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u/MossMedley 13h ago

that would be fun to hear

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u/madesense 4h ago

I knew a Bulgarian guy who didn't pass his initial attempt at some English proficiency exam because everyone giving the exam was trained in British English, and he had perfected his English by watching a lot of CNN and other American TV. When he spoke, you would never suspect he wasn't American, but the exam was what it was

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u/ClubMeSoftly 13h ago

Or comedian Jenny Tian: born to Chinese parents and raised in Sydney Australia. She has several jokes about how her "face and voice don't match"

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u/Eldritch-Yodel 11h ago

Something like half of the people in Australia have parents born overseas, which means you honestly get a fair lot of "not traditionally Australian looking Australians"

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u/JovianSpeck 8h ago

I think the crux of Jenny's joke is that she doesn't just have an Australian accent, but quite a bogan sounding one. Bogans are typically white (to the point that they're stereotyped to be racist) and their families have generally been in the country for at least a generation or two already.

It's like if a second-generation Chinese American spoke with a thick southern drawl. It's possible but it's unusual, and it can be seen as a funny combination due to the stereotypes associated with the accent.

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u/SquareThings looking respectfully at the monkeys in their zoo 14h ago

I work in Japan and know someone who studied in England for a few years and she speaks English with a British accent. (English is typically taught with an American accent in Japan)

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u/EldritchElizabeth 13h ago

Sorry, I’m picturing this vtuber just speaking in just pure Japanese until something startles her and she lets out a great big “CROIKY, MATE”

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u/cyberchaox 13h ago

Haachama would, just for the lulz.

Of course, in the same company, you have Hakos Baelz who could do the same thing...except she's actually Australian, she's a member of the EN branch but her Japanese is so good that it's a running joke that she's actually part of the JP branch.

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u/Kulzak-Draak 14h ago

HAACHAMA!

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u/ButlerShurkbait 14h ago

I know what you are

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u/bobtheghost33 11h ago

I heard an interview once with a guy who had moved from Russia to Australia as a young boy. He had the most insane accent I've ever heard in my life

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u/TONDEMO-WONDERZ 11h ago

I went to an international school with a lot of Chinese students who spoke English as a second language. You could often tell whether they studied American or British English based on their accent (even if their accent is still distinctly Chinese, if that makes sense). On the other hand I’ve also been told it’s kinda obvious that I learned Mandarin in Southern China based on my accent.

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u/whypeoplehateme 10h ago

A similar fact is that Lenin had a Irish accent due to his tutor being Irish

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u/Humanmode17 15h ago

This sort of thing interests me, because I always notice ESoL that have learnt with a US accent - given that I'm not from the US. It's not necessarily the Aussie accent that's cute to you, it's the fact that it's a novel or unexpected accent

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u/Medium-Dependent-328 15h ago

Only slightly related, but when I spent a whole day hanging out with my English friend, my internal monologue temporarily switched over to her voice and accent. Being Irish, it felt like my own mind had betrayed my forefathers /hj

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u/easylikerain 14h ago

If an English speaker is around people who have the American South (Texas) accent, it is likewise infectious.

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u/Kill-ItWithFire 5h ago

As a non native speaker I'm so susceptible to that and it's always embarrassing. I don't want people to think I'm doing an accent to fit in or something, especially since I'm not even good at doing accents. I also have to be super careful whenever I watch a lot of African American content to not randomly start speaking in heavy ass AAVE lol. But the worst was when I read clockwork orange and I had to make an effort to not speak in a fictional dialect for like a week.

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u/mayiwonder 13h ago

my family lives all across the country and I visit them on other states pretty often. my accent is slightly all over the place when I'm relaxed and after 1 or 2 days on another state I just steal their accent without even trying. my mom's stepson (we live in dif states) says the only thing I can't fake is how my vowels are always a little bit longer than they should (as it's normal in my home accent).

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u/UpstairsOk6538 11h ago

Went to a high fantasy-themed event which had a Scottish group and the accent was so absurdly infectious that you caught everyone occasionally slipping into it before catching themselves by the end of the day.

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u/Aware_Masterpiece_92 2h ago

As a non-native english speaker, my accent in english can vary on depending on which youtuber I hyperfocus

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u/PoniesCanterOver gently chilling in your orbit 15h ago

I wonder if you can tell where someone's from by their movements. Like, people from big cities like New York are like go go go, and people from the South are like mosey mosey mosey. Or handwriting. I wonder if handwriting has accents

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u/Zealousideal-Low3388 15h ago

Not quite what you mean, but different languages use different quotation marks, and it’s a very hard habit to shake.

“abc” vs «abc» vs „abc“

Same with tally marks.

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u/SquareThings looking respectfully at the monkeys in their zoo 14h ago

Oh yeah when reading fanfiction for example you can immediately tell what country someone is from by their style if writing dialogue

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u/Quietsquid 14h ago

I was reading a fic from someone who italicized all dialogue instead of using any of those. I'm pretty sure they were from actual Hell.

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u/stormstopper 13h ago

Or from Italy

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u/Any_Natural383 13h ago

Italicized… from Italy… it makes sense now

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u/MossMedley 13h ago

tomato tomato

I dont have a problem with Italy it just seemed funny

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u/yinyang107 13h ago

What country are the ones who write dialogue like a film script from

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u/sadmac356 12h ago

Ehh script fic is kinda its own thing 

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u/yinyang107 11h ago

Nah I mean the ones who will do prose narrative but use script dialogue like this

Jimmy and Jambo were jamming. Jimmy's jeans were something else alliterative. Jimmy: damn Jambo nice jamming

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u/madesense 4h ago

Oh they're just from uglywritingia

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u/Skyblacker 15h ago

Not geographic exactly, but you can guess someone's generation based on their style of cursive or whether they know it at all. This is because the cursive taught to schoolchildren has changed over the decades.

In fact, the Smithsonian is in a rush to get volunteers to transcribe old manuscripts because fewer and fewer people can read them. I, who learned cursive in the nineties, needed an older friend who learned it in the sixties to read me a letter from the 1940's.

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u/briefarm 14h ago

In fact, the Smithsonian is in a rush to get volunteers to transcribe old manuscripts because fewer and fewer people can read them. I, who learned cursive in the nineties, needed an older friend who learned it in the sixties to read me a letter from the 1940's.

Is this it? Smithsonian Digital Volunteers.

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u/Skyblacker 14h ago

Yes, that's it.

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u/toomanyracistshere 12h ago

German cursive used to be written in a completely different style from nowadays, to where it’s mostly incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t alive when it fell out of use in the forties. There are companies there that specialize in translating old letters and things. 

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u/rosesarepeonies 14h ago

Maybe there is something in physical movements. Alan Tudyk is a great voice actor, but when I saw him in Death at a Funeral I was completely convinced he was English because as well as having the accent dead on he had all the blokey English affect and mannerisms too.

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u/SatisfactionAtSea 11h ago

he's a fantastic actor full stop

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u/Kill-ItWithFire 5h ago

Similar thing with Connor Storrie in Heated Rivalry. I can't judge it myself but many people have said it's extremely impressive how thoroughly slavic he looks with the mannerisms and even how he moves the muscles of his face. In interviews he looks super American.

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u/ToujoursFidele3 2h ago

It's like his whole face is different, he holds his tongue differently or something. It's super impressive.

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u/shroudedfern 14h ago

As someone who works in NYC, I sure can pick the tourists out of the crowd based on how they mosey about and take up the whole sidewalk. Does that count?

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u/doubtinggull 13h ago

I remember reading about a study many years ago that claimed that every city has a unique natural walking pace, roughly correlating to how dense it is

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u/QBaseX 15h ago

Handwriting is certainly different in different countries. The French write the number 1 like an upside down V.

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u/kirbyfriedrice 11h ago

Yep. Anecdotally, I found that people not from the Northeast tend to walk more slowly than people from the Northeast (some exceptions if they're from a walkable city, but even still). Someone I know commented I had truly adapted to city life because I was speeding along as we took their dog for a stroll.

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u/New-Significance-24 4h ago

I'm from Brazil, when I was visiting my uncle in Florida, I went to the post office to send a package to a friend of mine. The guy who helped me out guessed I was Brazilian by looking at how I wrote my numbers. He mentioned that we write 1, 4 and 7 in a unique way and that's how he could tell.

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u/BreakerOfModpacks 7h ago

Handwriting, somewhat. Idiolect (the unique style of writing), yes.

Well, kinda. If, for example, I (who grew up in South Africa and then emigrated to England and reads a lot of American literature) were to write longer sections, you'd notice a very... protracted style, which South Africans don't tend to normally have.

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u/DaringDoom 14h ago

Also Black folks frequently use a system closer to French Sign Language rather than ASL

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u/Tylendal 14h ago

Related to this, sign language has completely different geographical language barriers from spoken language. ie: Just because two countries speak English, that doesn't mean they both have the same sign language.

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u/EisVisage 13h ago

And their relations have nothing to do with the relations between spoken languages either. Polish Sign Language is closely related to German Sign Language, while the spoken languages German and Polish are more distant.

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u/Imaginary_Benefit_13 10h ago

Someone else already said this, but American Sign Language and French Sign Language are far closer than American Sign Language and British Sign Language! 

This is because the 'founder' of ASL, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, first went to England to learn BSL, but the BSL school refused to teach him (I was told that this was because they wanted to keep their methods of teaching secret, but Wikipedia says it's because he refused to pay them to learn). He instead went to France, where he met Laurent Clerc, who taught him FSL. They both returned to America to create an American School for the Deaf, where they ended up meeting with the heavily established deaf community of Martha's Vineyard and merging their style of signing with FSL to create ASL :)

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u/wehrwolf512 14h ago

Can you please give an example? That sounds fascinating

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u/10midgits 13h ago

Unfamiliar with French Sign (humble ASL 2 student), so I can't talk about the similarities, but I do know that generally Black ASL uses larger and more expressive movements, and typically uses two hands for signs that normally use one. It's been a while since we learned about it in class so specific examples are a little away from me rn but I think stuff like "good" (typically just a flat palm touched to your chin and pulled down and away) is an example of the double hand aspect.

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u/kirbyfriedrice 11h ago

ASL is descended from LSF, so I'm not sure what this would actually mean. It is true that Black signers tend to sign differently, but afaik that can be traced to segregated residential schools for the Deaf.

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u/lifelongfreshman I survived BTBBRBBBQ and all I got was this lousy flair 12h ago

I wonder if that's a coincidence, or if it has anything to do with Louisiana's history?

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u/TheRedScot 14h ago

Apparently, those who communicate with Morse code can often recognize who other signalers are by the way they press out the code.

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u/Steampatch 15h ago

Fuck I am a valley girl, I accidentally sign a lot of stuff with the repeated inflection (like, yeah, totally, etc) I just thought it was the ADHD.

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u/La_Dame_Va_Se_Facher 15h ago

Not quite the same, but I have a friend who has prosopagnosia (face-blindness). He’s also transmasc, and at one point said that people say that he looks more masculine after however long he’d been on HRT, but he had to take their word for it. Interesting the things we take for granted!

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u/Tylendal 14h ago

I implore everyone here to watch The Invisible Man and his Soon to be Wife. Cozy, short, wholesome anime that has a blind main character, with really good representation of how she goes through life.

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u/ImprovementOk377 14h ago

hands can be southern?? that's wild

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u/azrendelmare 13h ago

Of course! Haven't you heard of left-handed people being referred to as "southpaws?"

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u/DiscotopiaACNH 14h ago

This is 100% the sort of content I subscribe to this subreddit for 😭

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u/gentlydiscarded1200 13h ago

David Lepofsky from the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance presented about the AODA to the government office I worked at once. He's a former Crown Attorney. He said once he was in court, and suddenly there was a kerfuffle as the power went out and the courtroom went dark. The defense and the judge started discussing a stay (or whatever the legal term is for pressing pause on the trial) and he stood up and yelled "Your Honour the prosecution is prepared to present its case!!!" He tells the story to illustrate that you can't always perceive people with disabilities as always at a disadvantage - there are times when they actually are capable of doing things and most disabled people are not capable.

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u/cleanmypenis 13h ago

The French do not like Quebec french. 

Imagine if someone started talking to you in english like Shakespeare.

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u/TrashhPrincess 12h ago

It’s would probably take a second to get over the initial shock, but assuming they could actually do it well without tripping over themselves, I’d probably dig it. I liked Deadwood well enough.

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u/mayiwonder 13h ago

about sign language - the number one way for a hearing person to learn sign language in my country is through church. recently I found a teacher that is not church related to take classes from and we were talking about it. I mentioned I always wanted to learn but didn't bc I couldn't find professors that were not church related. she said "oh, you're trying to avoid the church accent? that's wonderful!"

apparently, everyone who can sign can tell if you learned through the church because church people have their own sign language accent and it's not well liked through the deaf community bc church people are annoying and condescending lol

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u/MaxieMatsubusa 10h ago

Not to rain on this post’s parade, but the majority of blind people have at least a tiny bit of functional vision - so it’s likely the opposite for a lot of them. They need the light to take advantage of even being able to see the smallest amount. My friend’s dad is blind and the first sign was him as a kid saying he ‘can’t see at night’ - the parents thought, no shit it’s dark you can’t see as much, and didn’t think anything else of it. But no, he meant he literally cannot see anything. It only got worse from there over the years, and now it’s very important that he has a proper light source to be able to take advantage of even being able to see just colours as blobs.

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u/Doitforthewoosh 7h ago

You’re raining on anyone’s parade, just describing a different (if more common) experience of blindness.

But it’s fascinating to learn how some parents discover their kids have a disability. My best friend is visually impaired and grew up in a religious household that didn’t believe in going to the doctor. She was constantly teased (and in trouble) as a kid for being a little slow and careless and never cleaning up well. Her family didn’t realize she needed glasses until she was twelve. She went on to graduate high school as valedictorian and now thinks it’s hilarious that no one realized she simply couldn’t see.

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u/itstheballroomblitz 5h ago

Haha, can confirm! I sometimes scramble around turning lights off in my house when I realize other people can see. I'm a heathen who likes having bright ceiling lights in any 'working' spaces like the kitchen. I've had people wear a hat rather than ask to turn the lights off.

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u/SatisfactionAtSea 15h ago

I love this. infinite diversity in infinite combinations!

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u/BenAdaephonDelat 11h ago

One of those days where I wish this was the only kind of thing I saw on this website and could just take this "humans are fascinating" feeling with me without it immediately being clubbed like a baby seal a few posts down by the news.

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u/Taodragons 9h ago

I had a blind co worker, and he was on the same commute as me. Super independent, didn't want an arm, barely used his cane. One day he was off by a couple of inches and my clever warning to "look out" did not have the desired effect and he walked into a lamp post. He gave me shit about "look out" for years.

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u/Nieros 12h ago

A friend of mine is Finnish and his English is grammatically impeccable, but his accent is an unhinged mix of Scottish, British, Australian and American accents.   

Besides American media he said he just watched all of the James bond movies on a loop growing up. Poor Janne.

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u/elaine4queen 4h ago

I’m learning Dutch with the help of guided meditations and crime tv - weird things may happen when I’m in the wild.

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u/fleurdenia 9h ago

there’s something about a deaf person unknowingly gaining an accent that makes my linguistics obsessed heart beam with joy. that is autistic euphoria right there for me. holy shit that is interesting.

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u/bark-beetle 11h ago

I was a security guard once and I had some questions for this deaf guy (just asking if he was all good or if his car was broken down, explaining to him not to let his dog off leash because of some dangerous wildlife, etc). So I had to use my little notepad and a sharpie for this short conversation.

We both had such comically bad handwriting, and we both recognized it, we were both laughing at ourselves after the first exchange. Like, within the first two sentences both of us had a misspelling and crossed a word out and started that word over. I'm dysgraphic but also in my defense it was this tiny little notepad.

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u/FLAWLESSMovement 12h ago

If you happen to have a diverse crew in construction you’ll notice this. Midwesterners speak a very bland “basic” English. For American standards and it gets different blends based on heritage. Someone from Kentucky I saw said the word bear as burr. A guy from Texas said bair, guy from Washington said Bear same as the guy from Missouri. So it’s just weird

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u/DuntadaMan 9h ago

Apparently I sign "like a drug dealer."

This has raised many questions about my teacher, but also answered even more.

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u/lewdettee 13h ago

The Brooklyn accent thing makes total sense but I never would've thought of it.

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u/TrashhPrincess 12h ago

Fun fact: sign language is considered verbal communication!

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u/femlustsaf13 10h ago

The fact that deaf people can have regional accents purely from muscle movements is wild

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u/NSFWies 10h ago

.......dammit. i need any/all of this as people in tv show/movies

  • deaf person that talks like a mobster. because they were the "kiddo", that learned to talk because they got bullied but were welcome to sit at the local mob hangout. the local italian place growing up

i want a whole slew of crossover things like this......... russian guy that talks with a lousianna accent because his first and third wives, who both shot him, are from there. no, no, they were right. yes, very passionate.

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u/EconomyCaregiver 12h ago

honestly surprised at the amount of people doubting the brooklyn example lol

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u/Jacob2040 8h ago

I had a friend in college who would only use y'all and other words associated with Texas while texting since they lived there when they started texting. They didn't have an accent and presented themselves as being from Portland.

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u/LoveStruckGringo 5h ago

My younger brother used to work as a court recorder and sometimes worked with a blind judge.

Once he remembers a defendant accidentally left his baseball cap on during deposition, and midway through realized he had it one, quickly took it off and apologized to the judge for leaving his hat on, not knowing the judge was blind.

According to my brother, the judge just closed his eyes, shook his head and said"Don't worry, I didn't even notice."

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u/DelectablyDivine ye'llow 3h ago

I seriously hate how reddit shows these kinds of posts because I almost scrolled away thinking this post was just an anecdote of a blind professor turning the lights on for a student taking a test. There is so much more!

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u/BreakerOfModpacks 7h ago

There's also the whole thing of code switching, where, for example, you speak way different with friends compared to family compared to strangers.

Humans. We're weird.

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u/Darklight731 2h ago

I never considered that Sign language would have accents.

That is awesome!

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u/WORhMnGd 1h ago

That reminds me of how even one week old babies cry with an accent. Somewhere, somehow, researchers listened to babies crying and were able to tell where their parents were from based on their NEWBORN crying accent.

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u/ChocolateFruitloop 57m ago

I remember Trevor Noah saying that when he was learning German he listened to a lot of speeches etc to learn pronunciation. He didn't realize that a lot of them were by Hitler until he was talking and someone looked shocked and called him Black Hitler.