I need subtitles :/

[ratcreature]

I've watched the first three episodes of the Australian series East West 101, after I've seen it recced a couple of times. And so far I quite like the premise and setup, but I find it really hard to understand the dialog. With most US or British tv I miss maybe a word or half sentence every now and then, sometimes because of dialects, but more often because actors mumble, but in this series I frequently have no idea what they are saying at all for a whole exchange, not even when I replay and replay again. :(

(Totally unrelated, today's obligatory World Cup-related whining: I sincerely hope that once this is over I won't ever have to hear the stupid 54, 74, 90, 2010 song again.)

Comments

[enname]

I didn't have too much trouble with it, and I am generally quite bad with shows that mumble. I can aver that most Australians are great mumblers in general (me for example), when they aren't ripping out your ear drums with the nasal tones. They talk very quickly in natural speech (more so than most English speaking people, I come back from Britain and sound like a snail) and mumble. So you could say it is fairly true to how people speak on the street.

lilacisgill is correct about the accents though, and in particular I find that a lot of the ethnic accents keep their own patterns of speech which roll over all the hard consonants as well, the ones that mark out things like stops and commas. Not to mention a great deal of slang terms that is EW 101. A lot of my friends are from the same background as one of the main characters, and half the time I struggle to work out when they are even speaking English or have changed back to their native tongue.

[ratcreature]

I think part is just that because I've watched more US shows I'm quite used to that by now. I remember that at first when I was mostly used to fairly clear British English from the samples we had in school, I found Americans rather hard to follow too.

But I noticed that the word boundaries sometimes aren't the clearest. And sometimes when I listened again, I recognize how to break it up, and then can make out the parts more easily. That's a difficulty with German as well, when different regions use very different contractions, like "haben wir" if you'd write what is said down (with German spelling rules) can sound like hamwer (which would be what I'd say informally) but other accents might pronounce the same hammor, hemmer, or hamma. Obviously someone expecting to hear a sound like the written standard language said out loud would be totally out of luck.

[enname]

I am in France at the moment having a lovely time trying to follow anything, so yes I understand. Some diffferent pronounciations and contractions make more sense than others. The Norman accent is really quite interesting - hard in spots and then easier than standard in others.

Australian English, when spoken straight comes in three varieties - RP, middle and broad. RP is most like 'Queen's English.' What EW has is mostly middle/broad, although quite strong middle and then those that are ethnic. It is very front of the mouth and most of the ends of words are elided off, or given the annoying rising inflection if you are below 25. Think of the word 'Australian' itself. Most Australians would say 'Ostrayan' which automatically removes most of the consonants and heads into mumble land if you dip your head at all. Thus the old complaint that we are all from Austria. No final consonant. Then say, add my friend whose name is 'Fatima', she would say 'Fa-ma.' Add a fast flowing pattern of Arabic, Lebanese, Thai whatever patter, plus inner Australian 'laziness' produces a lot of vowels.

Hell, in most tv shows and news things they still subtitle indigenous speakers or those with heavy accents. *rolls eyes* Yet not Americans speaking dialect.