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by InsideOutSanta 575 days ago
"it’s easier for us to make the effort to understand than it is for someone to change how they speak"

Not just change how they speak, but learn entirely new concepts that do not exist in their language, and that they have no intuition for. I'm currently teaching German to somebody whose native language has no tenses, no cases, mostly no plurals, essentially no genders, different phonemes, and is written in a different script.

Having to not just learn these concepts, but be familiar enough with them to form an intuitive understanding and use them correctly in most instances, at a near-native level, is something that takes a decade or more for an adult. To be dismissive of somebody who makes that effort is pathetic.

1 comments

Yeah I thought we have a universal consensus that we never make fun of the way people speak English because they’re trying their best in a second or third language. And they’re doing that despite the challenges you point out.

If someone does it, it means they’re racist. The act itself isn’t racist, but I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that they’d have other racist opinions and do racist things.