OT: Off shore call center workers mad at American

[Atrocities]

This just proves my point from an earlier post that stated that companies SHOULD NOT export tech support calls to other countries....

We Americans have a higher standard of stupidity and require knowledgeable high school drop outs to provide out tech support.

[AgentZero]

Atrocities said:
This just proves my point from an earlier post that stated that companies SHOULD NOT export tech support calls to other countries....

We Americans have a higher standard of stupidity and require knowledgeable high school drop outs to provide out tech support.

Dammit man, I don't care if the tech support people are idiots, as long as they're knowledgable idiots! And I don't mind if the guy making my flight reservation doesn't speak English, as long as he didn't have to steal my job to do it.


Oh.... Wait....

[El_Phil]

I've been told by a variety of people that Dutch is fairly easy to learn.
I also happen to know that no South Africa dares speak Africans to a Dutchmen, as Afrikans is dismissed as 'Baby Dutch' or 'If your 10 year old kid spoke that bad you'd be seriously worried.'

Combining these two facts I would say that Afrikans is very easy to learn. Of course I have no evidence for this bar my own stab at learning Afrikans, which was conducted entirely in pubs and so isn't perhaps very representative.

[Evil_Duckie]

Phil,

I'm Dutch (cheers) and last year I had the chance of speaking to a South African. We found out that if I spoke Dutch and he spoke Afrikaans, we could have a perfectly good conversation. Some words are different, spelling is different, grammar is sometimes different, but we could get the meaning across.

I've got the same thing with Belgian clients who speak Flemish. No major problems at all, apart from the occasional odd word that we can then laugh about.

Speaking Afrikaans, but Flemish more so, is still somewhat considered to be a sign of having lower intelligence (but then again, some of the rural Dutch accents have the same stigma)

As for learning languages, I had no trouble learning English and almost consider it my 2nd language but I found German and French much more difficult. I really suck at those two, because they're so hard on grammar. I can speak/read/listen to German okay though.

Finally, when it comes to accents, don't forget that there's plenty of people with horrible accents in English-speaking countries too. I have a friend from Yorkshire that I simply cannot understand...