Join Denizen's Facebook!I was hanging out with my TCK friends Jason Chin and Fred Glander recently, when Jason, a med school student at Northwestern University, relayed this story to us:
“So I was doing a phone interview with the dean of admissions at the med school, and he said, ‘Jason Chin, huh? From Singapore… wow, your English is really good!”
“To which I replied, ‘Why thank you sir. I’ve been working on it my whole life.’”
Denizen’s anecdotes is for quick snapshots from your TCK lives. Email in your funny stories to steph@denizen-mag.com
Tags: Fred Glander, Jason Chin, Northwestern University
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3 Comments
When ever people say to me: “Wow your English is really good!”
I say “Thanks! And so is yours!”
^^
I recently moved to NYC from Australia and have quickly, inevitably adopted an American twang to be quicker understood.
Fumbling with change at the green market, I handed the vendor all of it with an apologetic:” Sorry, it’s too early to remember which one is 10 cents”
She looked at me funny and asked: “Are you from here?”
“No, if I was from here, I would know the difference between and dime and a nickel”
We laughed and she asked where I was from
“Australia”
“Oh my, your English is amazing”
“Ahhhh, we speak English in Australia”
“Oh, I meant your accent…”
Well, people speak English in India too (and I’m not just referring to those who learn it in school, a great deal of the population grows up speaking it)
It’s just that an Aussie accent is racialized as being legitimate, while the Indian accent is not (even though linguists agree that Indian English, like Australian or RSA English, is a separate dialect of English).