Language Barriers

After reading Mark's post about Bill and their trip to Monterrey, I started thinking about the language barriers that we all incounter. We have all more than likely been there. Whether its a friend thats first langauge is not English, or if you have ever been to a Walmart in Michigan (other than in Mount Pleasant), at some point in time it hsa been hard to communicate with someone else because of the langauge.
I had a great experience of this in Chile. They teach you formal Spanish in all your classes. You get a few classes away from graduating and then they through in the fact that if you travel to any Spanish speaking country, don't expect to understand them right away. Then they show you a video of people speaking from all over South American and the Caribe and ask if you understand, which of course you don't entirely. You can catch snippets and sometimes make out what they are saying, but thats about it. I had a friend from Puerto Rico who went to northern Spain and had no idea what anyone was saying. Needless to day, it was not really uplifting.
But, I went to Chile anyway and had a great time. But it was really hard learning their slang. We had a whole class dedicated to Chilean Spanish. The teacher taught us some grammar, but a lot of it was us asking here what a term or phrase meant. The Chileans pride themselves in the fact that someone from Argentina, etc. can come to their country and have no clue what they are saying. But, since we all lived directly in the language, we caught on quickly enough and could communicate well.
I was excited coming to the UK because they speak the same language (kinda -- I would have been REALLY excited if they spoke Spanish.) Then we get here, and have no idea what any one is saying! In the States we are all aware of some of the differences in terms, such as a flat is an apartment in the USA. And we have met International Students from Glasgow that are studying at CMU. We knew the accent was thick, but we figured we could handle it. Well, the first day that we were here, we had no idea what any one was saying. At all. We were constantly asking people to repeat themselves or just smiling and nodding. It has gotten better now that we have been here for a month and a half, but at times we are still asking people to repeat themselves. Working has been great for me, I just ask the ladies there... what does this mean? And they explain all the terms for me. Some of its really odd... like calling pop, "ginger". And fries are "chips" and chips are "crisps". And the "crisps" here are all really odd flavors, at least they have good old pringles.