Blog

lotsa weird things occur on buses – and one situation that can be awkward and infuriating to listen to is when a foreigner asks a bus driver a question in broken english – and the bus driver responds in his usual slangy english – which baffles the foreigner – which provokes to bus driver to either repeat himself or paraphrase himself in even slangier speech – and often in a raised voice – as if the foreigners problem is deafness

i havent had many such encounters in the first person – but thanks to watching the embarrassing performances of bus drivers – i managed to talk slowly and carefully – maybe  too carefully – once i was helping a young japanese women who spoke excellent english – and she would giggle occasionally when i spoke

anyway – im tempted to write a letter to the bus bureaucracy – even tho they probably just make a bonfire of such papers at the end of the year – in it would say something like this

i recommend mandatory training for all bus drivers – old and new – in techniques for aiding foreign riders

• the driver should be told to mentally switch gears – to prepare himself to think and talk differently
• he should think of the foreigner as a child – but not treat him like a child
  • use short simple sentences
  • slow his speech down
  • avoid slang and big words
• dont raise his voice
• he should be forced to listen to a sample of the typical bad scene
• he should be forced to practice the techniques during training – maybe with a foreigner present

thinking of this has made me think of Basic English – an innovation of britisher C.K. Ogden – a linguist who sought to make english easier for foreigners to learn simply by stripping the vocabulary down to the minimum number of words needed to talk about just about everything nontechnical – he wound up with 850 words – its use would sound perfectly normal to an anglophone because it didnt break rules of english

it never gathered momentum – but there are still advocates – and books and websites devoted to it

ive always liked the premise – however ive found it difficult to learn – how does an english speaker memorize 850 words and confine himself to them

until that happens – foreigners who only know basic english – will find talking to nonbasic english speaker alot like talking to seattle bus drivers – but without the shouting

(first published on MySpace around 2013)