I was thinking about it a lot before I chose to go to the US instead of Erasmus in Europe. One of the reasons for going to the US was that I wanted to speak English with native speakers and avoid learning for example "Spanish English" in Spain.
Like I'm not an expert or anything. After all, the point is to be able to express yourself with what you know at the moment. But I find this fascinating so I'm sharing a few observations I made at CERN :)
Observations:
- People wait in "queues" instead of "lines".
- Prepositions are one big mess. Don't pay attention to them. When somebody says they were "in the lake", they don't necessarily mean swimming. It might mean they just walked along the bank.
- I feel like most of people have either Greek or Italian accent. I'm afraid I will get the Greek one by the end of the summer :)
- Surprisingly, it is easier to understand native speakers for me now. Non-native speakers sometimes sound as if they were speaking their first language and not English, which is confusing. A great example is French English. The melody of the speech sounds completely French, words that have the same spelling in both languages are of course pronounced the French way, and you need to pay close attention to find out whether it is actually French or English. There are exceptions of course, but I met quite a few people who spoke like that. It's really funny :)
- I love it because you can make fun of each other for the way you speak or the funny things you say unintentionally.
Not to mention the signs in French and English. They are epic. The picture is from the bathroom in the CERN Data Center. I feel like a software user rather than a bathroom user :) Or maybe it's just me. I need to find some more and take pictures. By the way, I find some of the accents super cute :)
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