TheVision wrote:
T he apologised for his English as he'd only been in the country for three years. Thing is, his English was a load better than I can speak any other language, let alone Portuguese. People amaze me.
I feel this too, I worked in a place in London that had a wonderful variety of backgrounds, and that's something I miss. They really had a good handle on English, but other than some rudimentary (and mostly useless) high school level French and Spanish, I got nothing.
It's easy for us English-speakers as so many other folk can use ours as a second language.
Dr Zoidberg wrote:
No problem. Their daughter spoke excellent English, the mum knew some, the dad a bit less but still enough that we could communicate. Their son only knew a few words, but he was 11 or 12 so that’s hardly surprising.
Equally unsurprising is that’s why they wanted to come here, so they didn’t have to learn another language from scratch.
I wonder how they got on in Ireland and Scotland, as I find some of the really thick accents from those countries can be really hard to decipher, and oh boy the slang that's used, sometimes it feels like a foreign language itself.