UK v US language difficulties reply to post from MAIN

[dumbledore11214]

Cassy:

You know, what I find really amazing is that people, for whom English 
is not
first language (myself included) somehow manage to understand BOTH 
British
and American English. (well, not Australian, perhaps ^_~). And being 
native
Russian speaker I can understand Ukrainian, Polish or, say, Belarussian
fairly easily, since the languages are quite close. How come that people
speaking ONE language have so much difficulties understanding each 
other?


Alla:

So, I thought I would reply here, since this does not have much to do 
with the books, but something I find fascinating nevertheless.

I would agree with you that Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian 
languages are very close and easy to understand despite some words 
being different. But I would probably disagree with you that all people 
can do that.

I would say that people who grew up in Ukraine and who had to learn 
Ulrainian certainly had no problem understanding Russian ( and they had 
to during soviet union times), but I definitely, definitely experienced 
several situations when people from Russia had no clue what we were 
talking about in Ukrainian.

Hey, I have a living example of this here in New York, hehe.

My brother's best friend is from Saint petersburg. When my brother and 
myself sometimes start talking in Ukrainian, he has NO freaking clue 
what we are talking about.

That is despite at least 80% of vocabulary of both languages being the 
same indeed.

So, what I am trying to say is that I have no problem understanding how 
couple unknown words can completely confuse the meaning of the 
sentences for some people and make them loose the thread of the 
conversation.

I think you and myself have no problem understanding both versions 
because we in school learned british version ( I am not sure where you 
live right now), when I came to America, that was really not that much 
of the problem to substitute some words for anothers.

I think also we are used to figure out the meaning of the unknown words 
in  the sentences  just because we have to, you know?

The fact that I have no problem understanding both versions british and 
american, does not mean that I do not see new words here and there and 
no, I do not always keep my dictionary near by now when I read fiction, 
so I will figure the word out in the context.

Does that ring true?

Alla