What English Sounds Like To Non-English Speakers

A short film for THTR 1020. (Speaking begins at 1:17)

For clarification: Many words spoken in the video are actual English words. When put together, however, the sentences make little to no sense. While many non-English speakers can pick out words they recognize, they still often fail to make sense of an entire statement.

[julil.]

My little cousin heard this and I asked “is English?” to test it since he only speaks Spanish. He said yes.

[omegaqxj]

The fact that he sprinkled in some comprehensible words throughout makes this even more authentic

[scottibrown]

I’m an American and one of the most vivid conversations I ever had was with this French woman I met at community college. I asked her, “we have our impression of what French sounds like, do you guys have an impression of what we sound like?” And her answer has stayed with me ever since.
She answered with this: “you guys talk loud and fast and I don’t know why”

[alexh]

The thing that makes this great though is that English is taught in foreign countries so that fact that they sprinkle in real words that you can understand kind of how a foreign person would recognize the common words but still not understand the rest makes it even more accurate

[hannahkahnwald]

as someone who learned english as a second language this is almost nostalgic. at a certain stage of learning you can make out a lot of words but it's not enough to understand anything. this is exactly what watching this is like.

[jnnyoy]

I mean, imagine learning your lines for this scene.

[yvngdoja]

How it feels to watch Netflix in a noisy area with no subtitles 😂

[Ave_Christus_Rex]

It's incredibly fascinating how they managed to make gibberish sound like real words

[percivn]

the fact that he manages to make some of this sound like real words is truly pelatable

[giulioborghi]

As an Italian that learned English year after year, i can assure you that this is 100% how English sounded like first times i heard it

[enzosg]

as a Spanish Speaker that learned English, this feels like trying to understand someone talking to you while there's other people talking in the room or the surroundings

[GoodVibes]

English is my 2nd language and that's what I heard the first couple of years living in the US. That was 37 years ago. I'm doing muuuuch better now. 😊😊

[wellwhoknows]

this sounds like trying to remember your dream the next morning

[leechlord]

Even as an English speaker, I thought he was just talking in regular English at first so I 100% get how non native speakers can hear it like this at first

[cinders]

This is actually genius. Using words most English speakers would understand, just thrown into sentences they have no right being in suddenly makes it borderline incomprehensible

[GAVA]

I think this is the most accurate version of this I’ve heard so far.

[shriekynoodles]

I have bad auditory processing issues, so when there's any background noise this is what most conversations sound to me

[Pot_ofGold]

The thing is, the tone sounds so familiar that I still feel like I understand even though it's gibberish

[trianglearchives]

He's speaking the YouTube auto-generated subtitles

[kerihazelton]

I was just wondering to myself the other day what it would be like to hear English as a non-English speaking person. This is oddly timely for me lol