It's now officially the world language, with courses being taught in every country and a wide and interesting assortment of people learning to speak and understand it. Every foreign student needs to prove they are fairly competent in using the English language before coming to study in this country, but nothing prepares you for the avalanche of words and phrases that wallop you as soon as you land on British soil. The English language as practiced on this island has to be the quirkiest and, frankly, the most hilarious language around.
Take my pathetic case, for instance. I was so used to using English as my primary language I had absolutely no idea how hard understanding the actual dialect would be. However, two hours in the country and I was having difficulty understanding why the man selling train tickets at Manchester airport had told me to 'leg it' (obviously, I now understand that with five minutes to go before my train left and two suitcases to lug down a ramp, I had no choice but to 'leg it'). My first reaction at that time was: 'leg what?' In the process, I stood like an over-sedated pigeon and kept staring at the poor man who ultimately told me to run like a gazelle otherwise I would miss my train.
Terminology relating to food and money is also frequently entertaining. I will put down five pounds now that no foreign student discovers how pudding actually means dessert until the end of their first term. I have had to turn down offers of dessert (concealed in the word 'pudding') innumerable times in my first year because I just didn't know that pudding really meant dessert. I had always thought of pudding as vile piles of yellowy-pink goo that aunts and other killers used to force down my throat. Similarly, no English language course in the world actually tells you that a quid means a pound, or that one grand is equal to one thousand pounds. We just don't know all this when we arrive here, and have to stand around and look vaguely like we've just lost our best friend when in reality, all we really want is for someone to point out that 'on yer bike' should not be given any literal significance.
Added eccentricity presents itself if you decide to study at any institution within Yorkshire. Apart from the amazing warmth that the local people exude and the gorgeous scenery that flies by the train window during any journey into Yorkshire, some of the words and phrases used here and our foreign perceptions of those often create an incredibly riotous outcome. There's an almost reverent attitude towards cups of tea in this region. Anybody who publicly denounces tea-drinking (for whatever insane reason) can be sure of having their head squashed to pulp in the bus by a collective enemy in the form of umbrella-swinging ladies and heavily-booted men.
There is also an almost quaint averseness to using bad language. Most verbal abuse people sling at each other is often restricted to 'soft' words like 'bloomin' or 'bloody' that precede the rest of their exciting phrase. In its own harmless way, getting accustomed to this kind of verbal abuse is rather shocking if your exposure to verbal abuse in the English language has been restricted to Hollywood action movies and particularly foul-mouth English friends. Once the initial language shock wears off, however, I've found that episodes of such misunderstanding are often mutually enjoyable and certainly add a tangy flavour to the entire foreign student experience. The British dialect undoubtedly has the tendency to establish its iron grip on even the most strong-willed of people. Our own accents, coupled with the adaptation of local and regional dialects are something that every foreign student initially suffers from, ultimately adopts and takes back home as a very unusual souvenir.
