Why You Can’t Understand English

March 17, 2010 – 1:45 pm

Say this whenever you do not understand English: ‘Please repeat that, using different words.’ Say using different words so they will not repeat the same sentence you did not understand.

The six usual reasons you cannot understand English are:

(1) English is always changing. In everyday life we use idiomatic expressions most of the time. Nobody knows them all, not even native speakers of English.

For example, today I saw the poster above on a bus stop advertising a brand of liquor. The poster said: ‘R.U. Bot or Not?’ There is no such word in English as bot.

Bots, short for robots, is a noun. You will always see this word in its plural form, bots, never as a single bot. But in the sentence above, bot is singular, and it is an adjective, not a noun. These grammatical changes added to my confusion about the English on the poster.

In addition, the connotation of the word bots is mostly bad, of course. Most Internet bots are considered negative, because robotic programming is one way thieves steal information off computers that don’t belong to them. Badness was obviously a message the advertisers wanted to convey with this liquor ad: ‘Are you bad or not?’

(2) Confusion. Confusion is a hook to catch your attention. Advertisers use confusion to make you stop and look—and buy something. For this reason we see a steady stream of meaningless abbreviations and misspellings coming from advertisers and merchants.

(3) Slang. Another reason we see incomprehensible messages is because people are trying to be cool, to use a slang word. If you don’t know what cool means, type ‘What does cool mean?’ into your search engine.

Money Saving Tip: Never waste your money taking a class in idioms or slang expressions. By the time you have memorized a list of words and phrases, nobody will be using them anymore. They will be out of date.

(4) Accents. If he has a Spanish accent and you are Korean, it will be difficult for you to understand his English. Accents may cause his vowels to sound different. You simply may not be able to understand one sentence he is saying. Even native speakers of English have a hard time understanding people with heavy accents. For this reason, students of English may want to work with accent reduction tutors.

(5) You Cannot See the Person. Experts in communication say that 70% of the message comes from seeing the other person, the visual part. We understand each other best when we can see each other’s facial expressions, body, and hand gestures.  Making eye contact is also important to good communication.

Look at  this famous photograph, taken in 1932 during the construction of a building in midtown Manhattan. You will notice that decades ago we used to focus all our attention on the person next to us.  That changed with the invention of the cell phone and Internet technology. Now we prefer to communicate mainly with those far away.

(6) The Other Person Does Not Want to Be Understood. Communication is a two-way street. If you cannot understand somebody, maybe he does not want to be understood. If someone is speaking in a vague or incomprehensible manner, just try to understand the basic or essential part.

Some Questions for Discussion:

1. Many students have studied English for ten years in school but cannot speak it. This is true of all language instruction, because language teachers do not teach conversation. For example, I studied French for six years in school but the opportunity never came up for me to practice speaking French.
2. Many people who have studied English for a long time come to New York City but discover that they cannot understand English as we speak it here in everyday life. Does this describe you? What might you do to remedy this uncomfortable situation?
3. Do you think it is important to understand everything about another language, or is it okay to just be ‘good enough’—not perfect?
4. Do you think cell phones enhance or block communication?

The photograph at the top of this article is taken from an ad for Svedka vodka.

Also shown is a graphic detail from Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, a famous photograph depicting eleven construction workers seated on a girder eating their lunch with their feet dangling hundreds of feet above the New York City streets. This famous photograph was taken in 1932 by Charles C. Ebbets during the construction of a building in Rockefeller Center.

Photos and Text Copyright © 2010 Barbara A. English         All rights reserved.