Working with Foreigners

[Japher]

flipside:

I don't mind being patient or sympathetic to foreigners that I try to chat with. The owner of the liquor store I frequent is Veitnamese and is alright with english, and he trying to learn spanish too, as most of his customeers are mexican.

The problem I have is when you are discussing a project with two coworkers and they start talking in another language. I hate when I ask them to do something, and the say they will, and then 2 days later they say "oh, I must of misunderstood"... How can I expect them to follow instruction properly? I can't and therefor they should be fired.

We are company in America making drugs for Americans. As an American I would like to think that the shot I am getting to cure my cancer, or prevent me from getting ill, or to save my life is made by a compitent team of professionals and that something didn't get lost due to communication error or in translation... I could die because of that!!!

I will ask them to use English when at work so they become more comfortable with the language and become a better part of the team. Yet, if I have to tell them twice they will be canned.

[Q Classic]

Oh does anyone else believe in the theory that the basic structure of language is determined by the fact that important things are said in short syllables whereas more abstract ideas are longer in length?

love. god. heart.

oxygen. freedom. nutrients.

nope.

[Az]

axi: that writing is not that difficult, actually.

[flipside]

[SIZE=1]

love. god. heart.

oxygen. freedom. nutrients.

nope.

Thank you

[Shi Huangdi]

I have a similar problem going to a large university, many of the TAs (Teaching Assistants) who lead the recitations often have very hard to understand accents, and moreover, often have a poor grasp of the subject material.

[Drake Tungsten]

it's strange that japanese would be largely a language with vowel terminators for the syllables, while korean have more variety on that part.

Why? They've been on seperate developmental courses for thousands of years, which is plenty of time for this type of difference to crop up. Many other aspects of the languages are still the same, however. They're both agglutanative languages, they both use particles to mark parts of sentences (and the particles are very similar, from what I've seen) and they both contain a fair amount of inflection. The sounds may be different, but the grammar is still very similar.

the dialects are all mutually intelligible

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Q Cubed

Oh does anyone else believe in the theory that the basic structure of language is determined by the fact that important things are said in short syllables whereas more abstract ideas are longer in length?

love. god. heart.

oxygen. freedom. nutrients.

nope.

What about "sex?"

OTOH, "ox" is shorter.

[Ted Striker]

Well on one hand it is cool to learn a key few phrases of the foreigners

On the other hand, it's extremly disrespectful for foreigners to only talk in their own language when you're in the room.

[Drake Tungsten]

I hate it when I'm trying to mack on some girl and she'll only talk back to me in Japanese. It's just disrespectful to throw salt in my game like that.

[dannubis]

Originally posted by Ted Striker
Well on one hand it is cool to learn a key few phrases of the foreigners

On the other hand, it's extremly disrespectful for foreigners to only talk in their own language when you're in the room.

funny, i have yet to meet the first american who can speak my language when he comes to my country ... But i accept it ?!?

[Drake Tungsten]

The difference is that your country is **** and your language is inconsequential. I doubt many Americans visit Belgium and even the ones stupid enough to do that aren't dumb enough to waste their time learning a bastardized form of Dutch or French.

[DaShi]

Yeah, you tell 'em!

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
...learning a bastardized form of Dutch or French.

Why? After all they learned a bastardized form of English too.

[Q Classic]

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

well, i know some are just bizarre. but i'm willing to wager there's more similarity between, say, how the hokkaido natives and okinawa natives speak japanese--akin, i'd wager, to the edinburgh accent and the chicago accent--rather than the cantonese and mandarin languages.
hell, i can't understand some of my distant korean relatives because they speak with some bizarre northeastern dialect. but it's mostly a matter of pronunciation, rather than actual concrete differences.

Why? They've been on seperate developmental courses for thousands of years, which is plenty of time for this type of difference to crop up.

point taken. there's no doubt that they've had related but separate development courses.

Many other aspects of the languages are still the same, however. They're both agglutanative languages, they both use particles to mark parts of sentences (and the particles are very similar, from what I've seen) and they both contain a fair amount of inflection. The sounds may be different, but the grammar is still very similar.

the problem is, with SOV languages, the structure tends to be the same. korean, basque, turkish, and japanese all have large amounts of grammatical similarities, including postpositions instead of prepositions, relative clauses before the nouns they modify, and so on.
i haven't seen one study that links basque and korean and japanese yet because of this grammatical parallel.
i will admit, though, they're each others closest relatives, but i'd have to say that they're much more distant than say, frisian and german. using those basic words as one basis of comparison has long been used to show relations between the different indo-european languages, particularly between specific groups (slavic languages, germanic languages, romance languages...).
in any case, c/j/k is an interesting case where one pushed much of its vocabulary onto the other two, which are completely unrelated in any other way to the first, and similar but quite different from each other.

[Drake Tungsten]

i will admit, though, they're each others closest relatives, but i'd have to say that they're much more distant than say, frisian and german.

I won't argue with you on this.