Scope’n the rows for cocoa” OR “Scope in the rose for Cocoa

The above sentence either says you are in the grocery store searching intently for baking chocolate, or presenting a gift of a flower filled with mint mouth wash to Lisa Spit’s cat Cocoa. This particular confusion was had by Joel when I said sentence #1 and he took it as #2 and had NO idea what I was talking about or trying to do. Yes, sometimes our language listening is trying so hard to decode the accents of our Hindi accented friends that our own sounds TOTALL foreign to us.

The language barrier is interesting. Many people DO speak English and have a really good vocabulary. But there are varying types of accents as well. And I’m assuming what method used to learn English and confusion with their own language rules is where my decoding process goes eschew . Some people pronounce some of their ESSES like SH. So we have “shalt and pepper.” Which, though I get the pepper word, my brain is still stuck on decoding “Shalt”. The interesting thing is this same person has just asked me if I wanted “vegetables” not “Vegetablesh”. I feel bad because things I should understand I just don’t. Or I do 2 minutes later. A women said to me “lee-MOAN and sue-GARE”. I had left the shop before I figured out she said lemon and sugar. Well, heck, there is NO H in Sugar. The joys of going from one difficult language to another.

I think Joel has a little advantage to this since he actually spends time around Hindi speaking people on a daily bases. He isn’t picking up a ton of Hindi but I do think it helps him translate Hindi English to American-mid western English for sure. The folks here have the same problem with us. They understand English REALLY WELL, It is our accent they don’t’ understand all the time.
(ACCENT! What do you mean ACCENT!!!?? We are Americans. WE don’t HAVE an accent. :).