[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
Also, teaching English as a foreign language for a bit helps with the annunciation.
Yes, I suppose it would, but realistically, how many times in your life will you have to inform a virgin that she’s pregnant with the son of God?[/quote]
I see what you did there. Slick. Real sly.
[quote]OneMoreRep wrote:
Forensics aside, which was kind of off topic of me to begin with
I have not been wowed by the non U.S. English speakers I’ve encountered. Now this is entirely anecdotal but I’ve known two brits, a new zealnder, an Australian and two Irish people. None were terrible speakers but nothing wowing and these were either at my university or through business, so these were educated individuals. Some of the mystique here around them is because as some girls say “accents are hot” For men I think because we are not used to it it sounds cool, but I don’t confuse that with actually being a great speaker, or a better speaker than myself.[/quote]
I would have thought that it would be obvious that there are going to be variances in the skill levels even amongst the British. I had an uncle who was a West country farmer who I could barely understand. Most of my conversations with involved nodding my head in agreement and the occasional Arrgh like a pirate.
Obviously not all of the British are all that either. Gordon Brown is a stammering idiot at the best of times.
It is not a mystique of accent. The English speak English better than anyone else because it is their native language. They are the ones who made the effort to raise the language’s usage to higher level.
At one time English was spoken by the peasants and lower classes. The English aristocracy spoke French. Queen Elizabeth sought to change this so she hired William Shakespeare to write plays in English so as to popularize the language and gain it wider acceptance amongst the upper classes.
[quote]
Also the extrapolation that because Daniel Hannan is a great speaker all English are are not great. I imagine not everyone is up to his level. And because the politicians in the US you’ve seen aren’t “good” then all Americans must not be able to enunciate or pause is also false. There are almost 300 million Americans, it’s tough to say none of us are great communicators.[/quote]
There are over 300 million people in America, but only 60 million of them are of English descent. The means that %80 of the population is descended from people who only a few generations ago didn’t speak any English.
A lot of people can speak well enough to get by and be understood. But there are a lot less people who have a good grasp of the subtleties of usage that can take their speech to a higher level where they are not just good they are exceptional. In America we just don’t have the same institutions that produce people who can speak like that like the British do.
I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree, because I think we have the institutions that other English speaking countries do not, I don’t think you need to be of English descent to be a master of the English language and I think there is too much of a population variance to make a blanket statement.
I think at current in my experience we are on par (once again in my experience) and in the future will have a group of individuals that are beyond other countries because of the type of communication scholarship (Forensics, not that debate you saw earlier) and the number of communication majors and elite communication departments (14 of top 20 are located in the US, source QS Top Universities,) the most of both come from the US. So while I won’t say everyone will be great speakers the US should have a lot of really good ones.
Ultimately I’m not going to buy that any country has intrinsically better speakers than another, meaning I don’t think the US has better speakers that Australia, who doesn’t have better speakers than Scotland etc.
I also don’t think I’m going to convince you of that, so its all good.
[quote]Sifu wrote:
In America we just don’t have the same institutions that produce people who can speak like that like the British do.
[/quote]
Never mind the British. Lots of European countries have us beat.
A friend of mine was a member of the Tokyo chapter of Toastmasters International, and he invited me to one of their meetings.
He and the other Americans were good, but by far the most eloquent, polished and downright engaging speaker of them all was a gentleman from Germany. His enunciation was flawless, as was his tempo and modulation.
What really set him apart, though, was his precise use of the language. Every word had been carefully selected for maximum clarity of meaning, and fitted together with every other with the skill of a Bavarian watchmaker.
It highlighted for me the tremendous disparity between the American educational system and the European one, and (sad to say) I’m sometimes reminded of this disparity here on this site. At what point exactly did it become no longer necessary for American children to be taught to read, to write, to speak, or to think?
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
Also, teaching English as a foreign language for a bit helps with the annunciation.
Yes, I suppose it would, but realistically, how many times in your life will you have to inform a virgin that she’s pregnant with the son of God?[/quote]
Lol, I speak well but can’t spell for toffee!
Mind you, at the school I was teaching anything was possible.