>>I am shocked that there are people who still use Cockney rhyming slang like "butchers."<<

Why? It's a colourful alternative, if used in moderation. Granted, it's irritating when people go out of their way to use it all the time. And often wrongly.

Slang or idioms are, of course, deviations from the standard language, so it is ironic that someone could use them incorrectly. And who slang doesn't have a sense of irony.

I find there are four main reasons for failing to understand Americans
1) slang
2) variations in meaning eg "underhand"
3) accents
4) cultural variations (think nodding Brit facing American who thinks the Brit "agrees" with him rather than just "understands" him) or Brits interest in humour or Americans need to fill silence with speech etc etc.

Of those 1) is a key issue when the other person does not know you are a foreigner, but should be resolved once that is explained (or else it is just bad manners, like IT geeks not speaking English), 2) takes time, give it feedback, 3) slow it down and repeat, 4) don't assume, give loads of feedback in very simple English.

I've run businesses in America and worked for Americans while based in UK/Europe. For the fine detail you need to avoid faux-ami.

You'll get there.

>>Slang or idioms are, of course, deviations from the standard language, so it is ironic that someone could use them incorrectly. <<

Not at all. A specialist subset of standard language, perhaps: but with its own regularities that its users will expect (and to the extent that it's meant either to exclude outsiders or act as an ID badge for insiders, those regularities are precisely the point).

Watch the long-running British soap Coronation Street to get a fix on working-class British slang.

PalenQ:
"Watch the long-running British soap Coronation Street"

I have a hard time understanding east enders, I dont think I would understand a word of coronation street

It's not the "accent" that mystifies me, it's the way of stringing words together. My DH and I tried hard the other night to catch the phraseology of our neighbor, but it's hard when she says things like: "Hey, yeh, so him 'n Nicole was wantin' to walk for town for get some pizza, 'n I says no, snot happenin' coz yous only got fih-teen, 'n its get dahk 'n I can't pick yous up, 'n anyway, yeh, who's yeh gonna meet for? Thems girls you hangs out with ah school, they's not more 'n figh-teen, aythah. Y'unnehstan' what I's sayin? yeh? Tell 'em they c'n come by here if theys need foh pizza."


Jeez, makes my brain curdle! The local Scot I can understand mostly just fine.

StCirq:

"Hey, yeh, so him 'n Nicole was wantin' to walk for town for get some pizza, 'n I says no, snot happenin' coz yous only got fih-teen, 'n its get dahk 'n I can't pick yous up, 'n anyway, yeh, who's yeh gonna meet for? Thems girls you hangs out with ah school, they's not more 'n figh-teen, aythah. Y'unnehstan' what I's sayin? yeh? Tell 'em they c'n come by here if theys need foh pizza."

Hahaha you made my day, what a fantastic example you gave.

All you need to do is look up Cockney Rhyming Slang.

Sod Coronation Street, try understanding old episodes of Shameless!

Not everyone in the UK sounds like Prunella Scales.

Thin

A specialist subset of standard language, perhaps: but with its own regularities that its users will expect (and to the extent that it's meant either to exclude outsiders or act as an ID badge for insiders, those regularities are precisely the point).
_______________
It is akin to when a cult becomes a religion, the moment it gains currency and respectability. Once slang or idiom is used beyond the group that coined it becomes standard or laughable, such as when American suburban women started using the word 'girlfriend' as used by the Black community.

Rhyming slang isn't British. It's an archaic London-area dialect.

A very few bits of it (like "take a butcher's) have migrated into almost national use. Most examples anyone might encounter today, though, are just silly, phoney ("apples and pears"), used by a tiny number of working-class Londoners or are a self-conscious piss-taking parody (like "seppo"for American - via "septic tank"), using references meaningless to any 19th century Cockney.

There are very few examples of national British slang. More problems other English-speakers have in understanding come from are Bilbo's explanations 2, 3 and 4.

But in my experience, far bigger ones are:
- we almost all speak faster than Americans or Australians and are more prone to run words together.
- our natural cadence is simply different: we put stress on different syllables and on different parts of the sentence.
- there's a different culture surrounding "clear speech for public understanding". Indeed, I find it increasingly common for multinational organisations to start off with a bias against using British (and in particular, English) public speakers because we don't instinctively make the same allowances for international audiences all non-native English speakers learn - and that far more Americans acquire.

There are a fair few examples of rhyming slang that are very much in everyday use. "Brassic" for being absolutely stony broke comes from boracic lint = skint. "Berk", for an idiot, is said to come from "Berkshire Hunt", rhymes with - well, I won't type it here. "Ruby" or "Ruby Murray" for a curry has outlived the fame of whoever Ruby Murray is.

Lots of glottal stops & swallowed consonants can make things difficult for foreign visitors. I remember trying to teach an American friend how to say the first word of "Tottenham Court Road" as Londoners would. "To'n'm."

And then there's the whole Cheeky Nando's thing... https://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/g...-of-banterbury

Is there a Rosetta Stone for that? : ) I'm starting to think we'll need to brush up on our English before visiting London this fall.

Just listening to the radio and a bloke used 2 examples of rhyming slang within 20 seconds..... He was going to have his "barnett" done (Barnett Fair = hair) and his "old China" was going with him (China plate = mate), lets not even bother with the "frog & toad" and the "rub a dub".

http://www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/

<<<He was going to have his "barnett" done (Barnett Fair = hair) and his "old China" was going with him (China plate = mate)>>>

Great examples of where rhyming slang is so well-established that I'd forgotten they were even rhyming slang to start with!

>>whoever Ruby Murray is.<<

Unavoidable in the 1950s:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z4_JqPhyGw

Most people with a good education know how to speak a relatively standard English, whether British or American, avoiding strong regional accents and local dialect words, and this is usually well understood by all English speakers.

I worked for a while in an international office in the Hague, where English was the lingua franca. I learned to speak a variety of English that was easily understood by people of most nationalities. In those days, most Europeans learned the British variety of English at school, so "lift" was preferable to "elevator", for example. And since some of my colleagues were from Romance language countries, a cognate of Latin was often better understood than an Anglo-Saxon word, for instance, "continue" rather than "go ahead". I've found this way of speaking useful in Italy as well, when people want to converse in English with me.

Where I live, many Italians speak the local dialect among themselves, but they would make a great effort to speak their best standard Italian when talking to someone not from around here, including foreign tourists who are trying to speak Italian. Now that I've been here for almost 20 years, some people assume that I don't need any such accommodation any more, but a very strong local dialect is still pretty incomprehensible to me.