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Letters R and L’s in Asia
- Thread starter stylinexpat
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It's always interesting to order "One fried rice, to go please" at the local Chinese take out joint only to hear the guy taking the order repeat, "One flied lice, to go."
Yep, I hear this every day. Also try Arabic, where there is no "p" sound in the language. "Put" becomes "boot", and many other interesting words and misinterpretations come to mind! Don't even even try to explain the English word "zip"... 
True.. If that person only speaks Arabic then that person struggles to speak English or any other language but if that person speaks Arabic,English and Mandarin (Chinese) then that person should have no problems with any letters or pronunciations.Yep, I hear this every day. Also try Arabic, where there is no "p" sound in the language. "Put" becomes "boot", and many other interesting words and misinterpretations come to mind! Don't even even try to explain the English word "zip"...
Haha.
Before snapping pictures a photography team in Beijing would shout in unison, “SMELL”!
I had no choice but to smile.
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Yep, I hear this every day. Also try Arabic, where there is no "p" sound in the language. "Put" becomes "boot", and many other interesting words and misinterpretations come to mind! Don't even even try to explain the English word "zip"...
There was a fairly large Philippine population in Northern California. It used to crack me up hearing them pronounce the letter “f”. F’s were pronounced like the letter “p”. So a phone number would sound like, “Pibe, pibe, pibe - pour, pour, pibe, pour.” Lol.
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Used to work in a building on the Vietnamese equivalent of the Pentagon during the war. One night we pulled up to the gate into the place in a truck. The guards were older, didn’t speak English very well and had a Vietnamese-English dictionary in hand. One of the guards managed to haltingly get out the question “How often you go through gate tonight, eh?”
Whereupon my friend and co-worker, without missing a beat, responded “Oh, periodically.”
Been more than 50 years and still remember the exchange verbatim. LOL
Whereupon my friend and co-worker, without missing a beat, responded “Oh, periodically.”
Been more than 50 years and still remember the exchange verbatim. LOL
Many of the Chinese though quite often can’t get their own words in their own language pronounced properly. This is quite common in Taiwan,China and Hong Kong. Try getting some of the locals who speak their own local dialect to pronounce some basic words in Mandarin (Chinese) and you will be surprised how many people can’t pronounce their own words properly. England has some of those issues too.
A tourguide in Japan, speaking English, told us that she was going to say a word that always gave her trouble. She wanted to describe the curls atop the Buddha's head. She gave it her best try, but it came out more like culz. That interaction was more memorable than the Buddha's hair.