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It’s largely aesthetic reasons, but grad-student TAs who speak unintelligible English are a well-known and yet unaddressed practical problem.
It is alienating and subconsciously hostile to one’s innate sense of community when the prevalence of myriad exotic accents reaches a certain level.
Also, the Chinese nationals are totally spies for the PRC. It’s fine if you’re not a China hawk (I’m not either), but it’s obviously happening.
At least from personal experience, I suspect it's unaddressed because it's an incredibly minor problem.
Speak for yourself. I truly do not get the visceral disgust people experience from hearing other accents or languages.
Really? All of them?
See, I am a China Hawk, and I think it is absolutely braindead not to siphon off every bit of human capital from them we can. The risk of the occasional PRC spy pales in comparison. You don't have to give them jobs designing ICBMs.
Really? What major were you? Because having an utterly worthless TA for 90% of my math and programming courses was brutal. The few that did have a native American TA were lightyears different.
Really? The number of Chinese students we retain is awful (under 50%, sources are all wildly different) and has been dropping continuously since 2004. We're not siphoning human capital at all! We're building it up in exchange for full-tuition cash and cheap bodies to fill TA positions!
Math for undergrad, stats for grad school. Had a Chinese professor who was pretty terrible, but I also had several other Chinese and Korean professors who were totally fine and a number of American professors who were also pretty bad.
The TAs were always fine, even the ones who weren't native English speakers.
Probably because we don't try very hard.
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The question is, do they stay siphoned? They may not necessarily have loyalty to the state, but they have a sort of loyalty to the land and the people that said state controls, and they also may have family that can be leveraged to achieve whatever goals the state dreams up.
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When those accents are Saxon, Bavarian, Swiss, Austrian or possibly even the rare breed known as French, fine. I can live with that.
But migrantisch pisses me off. Doubly so when ethnic Germans adopt it, but let's skip that case for now. It highlights that those people are not part of the same community but in fact either of a different parallel one or of none at all. Either way they can't be fully trusted.
And that's for accents. Foreign languages are tourists at best, but all that arabic, turkish and russian isn't tourism but a full-blown fifth column of opportunistic parasites who couldn't give less of a shit about this place if they can't even be assed to speak the local language. Trust or a feeling of community aren't even a factor at this point; this is migration warfare the way the Völkerwanderung or the colonisation of the Americas was. We may be at the turkey-eating stage right now, but if those Pilgrims don't stop speaking English soon, then I think I know where we're headed.
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It's not aimless disgust. It's frustration. Thick accents make communication difficult. They add friction to every aspect of an interaction. I don't dislike foreign-born doctors because I just think they're icky for no reason because I'm vanilla and lame. I dislike them because I have to strain every scrap of my ability to parse what the hell they're saying, and a misunderstanding might actually be a very big deal.
Imagine spending a few hours providing customer service for Karens who speak English at a roughly kindergarten level. Imagine spending fifteen minutes and using multiple devices with translators, to try to explain the difference between a square and a circle to a woman who just looks at you sadly, says "No comprendo...", and then goes back to asking for a square circle.
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Could you please provide evidence in proportion to how inflammatory this claim is? (I am more of a China hawk than many, but I'm also an unsupported-claims hawk.)
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Professors, too. I once bombed a midterm in an otherwise easy A math class because the professor asked the literal exact opposite of what he thought he was asking for a major section of the exam. Apparently he noted nothing amiss when all the best students got 100% of the questions in that section wrong.
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Hopefully this tech will become portable soon enough that anyone can just take out their smartphones and pop in their earbuds to get around the issue. https://x.com/shweta_ai/status/1912536464333893947?t=45an09jJZmFgYosbqbajog&s=19
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This guy is not Chinese though, so this is a total non-sequitur for this case.
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The Canadian reddit posts about "should I be upset all my grad seminars are in hindi?" are a real eye opener about how much worse things can get.
We already have the perfect counter-example to people going "woah, why do you even care bro, how does this affect you personally, seems kinda sus, I don't care about hearing funny accents and eating nummy ethnic food, you must be racist"
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