Howyagoin?
Sep 5th, 2007 by Andrew
We had lunch at a restaurant with an Australian family the other day. As we were walking to lunch one of them made the sarcastic comment of "So, just loving China then, can't think of anywhere else you'd rather be?" I was such a normal day-to-day Australian way of asking a question that I was taken by surprise. Most foreigners from other countries don't use sarcasm and I'd gotten out of the habit of using it and wasn't expecting it!
Living and working overseas means that all the colloquialisms, slang and humorous jibes all need to be removed from your day-to-day speech. It made me realise that no-one except another Aussie will truly understand exactly what you mean every single time you say something. Sure, many nations share the ability to speak in English with people from other countries and we can communicate with each other, but it's like a layer of communication gets stripped off leaving just starched raw information, like notes written on a stave compared to music performed by an orchestra.
From that point onwards you can imagine the sort of conversation we had over lunch. The Australian slang just poured immediately back into the conversation, the speed at which we all spoke accelerated (Aussies are speedy talkers!), we talked about all kinds of Australian things, the things we missed, the things we liked, politics, sport, animals, all the while being completely Australian about it.
It felt like for a few brief hours an invisible weight had been lifted.
3 Responses to “Howyagoin?”
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on 08 Sep 2007 at 10:14 pm1ashleighAnd I bet anybody else who had been around you speaking English would have been lost. (Reminds me of our fits of laughter about come of the corporate types, the poor non-Australians in the room wondered what on earth all the hysterics were about. They must think we are all nuts.)
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on 18 Oct 2007 at 6:20 am2jordoJust back from the USA. They had no idea how to listen to us aussies speak. Yes it appears that we do speak too fast and run our words together,ie howyagoin. I had rang the concierge for a wake up call at 5am. she said 4am? I said no 5am. Needless to say we got woke at 4am! But another fella another day had the same probs but after i said number 4 not number 5 he re-asked the number and said did I mean 12?????? Like what the???? Anyhow I was lucky enough to bump into more aussies so we just bantered on as normal. Gotta find it hilarious though eh.
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on 18 Oct 2007 at 8:46 am3AndrewHaha. Yeah, I had similar experiences in the US about 3 1/2 years ago. The only way I could get my point across over the phone was to speak very slowly and clearly and try to talk with an American accent!