Just give her a break already!!
So, I am currently attending an American University, which almost prides itself for how “liberal” it is. (Though next semester I’ll be studying in China, but that’s a different story)
In preparation for my study in China, I decided to take Chinese history. My lecturer is from South Korea, has studied history in China (at the same university I’ll be going to no less), and speaks fluent English. However, my classmates do not agree. Many of them were complaining about her accent, her grammar mistakes, and how she couldn’t understand their questions at times.
As for me, growing up around accents, it didn’t faze me. When a classmate of mine started to tease her grammar mistakes “do you remember when she said blah blah?? How funny was that?” I honestly didn’t remember those mistakes. I mean, my own PARENTS make the same mistakes so I don’t even hear them anymore.
Then everyone was complaining… I just had to say “Give her a break!” I mean, she’s traveled half-way across the world to teach here, in a language that is not her own. Like my mom said “She can speak English a heck of a lot better than we can speak Korean!” I’ve been in that same situation, and it’s not easy. Yes, she doesn’t understand you at times, yes she makes mistakes, but it’s through those mistakes that she’ll learn English better.
And our school is supposed to be “liberal.” If the students here can’t even deal with a foreign professor (and there are many, especially in the math department), then how liberal are we?
Laura
Well, I was born in Finland in 1988, lived in Germany for a year (when I was 1 year old, so I don't remember...does that count?) and then when I was 2 I moved to the US. I've lived in Finland for a year for a "foreign exchange" though I lived with my uncle's family, and I've spent a semester in China learning Chinese. (My fourth language, after English-of course, Finnish, German-studied for 6 years) OH! And I'm also a big anime fan, and I love Japanese, Italian, Finnish, and Chinese food. :)Related Posts
8 Comments to “Just give her a break already!!”
December 16th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Laura, I know what you mean and that frustrates me to no end. We had a math teacher in Canada, who was originally from Spain and spoke fluently but had an accent, and everyone made fun of him. No one listened, and eventually he had to be replaced and he lost his job, because students would refuse to listen.
I agree, just give them a break. Sheesh.
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December 16th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
I agree why do people find it so hard to jsut listen to people with accents and accept them. I have been in situations where just becasue someone didn’t speak English well or with a heavy accent people assumed they where not very smart. They where very highly educated people they jsut had an accent and where learning English really their vocabulary was huge I didn’t even know some of the words they where learning because they wanted them to express the things they knew.
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December 17th, 2007 at 2:56 am
What’s annoying for me in that situation is that “liberal” in the US means “left-wing”. It has absolutely nothing to do with what the rest of the world thinks is liberal.
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December 17th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Ok, now this scares me a bit… Does this often happen? Because I’m planning to be a teacher in international schools, so I get to see more of the world. But I do have an accent as well :S Gah!
Anyhow, I’ve experienced that quite often - I mean, people around me making fun of people speaking with an accent. It always annoyed me so much. And if you tell them to try to speak the other person’s language to see if they could do it without an accent, they usually say something along the line of “Well, I’m not the one going to the other country, am I?”. This is something that makes me wanna scream with frustration.
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December 17th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
It happens quite a lot here too. Even when it’s just british english they’re listening to, they can hardly understand. It’s less common here, but it happens to some people that think they’re cool and s*** and just make fun of everyone else living on the face of the earth. I think they’re just being stupid.. I mean I do kinda have an accent. People always tell me. I barely ever get made fun of, but when others make fun, I get all pissed.. I can’t stand it.
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December 17th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Lina, what kind of accent do you have? Sometimes accents *can* be an advantage, depending on where you live and you’re from.
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December 18th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Ack! I made a long post just now and I forgot to login again! And it’s bugging me that the comment didn’t make it so I am going to rewrite it LOL
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This thread reminds of my time in college. A lot of my science and engineering classes had many Indian and Chinese TAs most of which have heavy accets and some have difficulty trying to convey their point across in English. Nevertheless they were good teachers and they CAN understand English better than spoken.
It bugs me to no end when kids would start picking on them “behind their backs” and make rude comments about their accents. Kids would complain how they should get rid of foreign TAs (there was even an article written about this in my school paper, and oh the author was bashed!) because they don’t think it’s beneficial to the education. Uh yea, the education of ignorance.
Interestingly enough, these same kids have poor writing skills. So who gets the last laugh? I am almost sure that they would never think about going to a non-English-speaking country because they are not brave enough to communicate poorly in another language. They’re afraid of losing “face”. And here I thought Chinese people had it bad :p
(Ok I hope this one goes through this time XD)
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December 18th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
My accent is kind of messed up and I have no clue why. Germans tend to recognize it as German, but I’ve had people guessing just about every South American country (no idea why). And Ireland and South Africa for some reason, but that’s at least English. I also still tend to say yeees or breeeead or leecture which confuses some people. It’s fun actually :p Ahh well, maybe it’ll go away a bit more before I start teaching, still got quite a way to go to get there.
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