EASIER SAID THAN DONE : When Angelenos Talk, the Accent Should Be on Communication

Los Angeles has sophisticated ears and eyes. We know a Korean billboard from a Chinese one, though we may not be able to read either. The bloody names on TV--San Cristobal, Srebrenica--don’t sound nearly so alien here as they might in the Dakotas. And a colleague rightly asks, “What’s a foreign-sounding name in L.A. ?”

Yet over the counters of banks, over the tables at restaurants, over the phones to doctors’ offices, fourscore and eight varieties of spoken English--and our own native ones, from Ice T’s to Beverly Hills 90210’s--can create two-way exasperation and friction.

A language teacher told me that a black friend thought she lost out on a job because she couldn’t understand the questions being put to her in the interviewer’s accented English--and she felt too awkward to ask the interviewer to repeat the questions or explain them.

A white bureaucrat I know sat through a 15-minute briefing but couldn’t decipher what the foreign-born consultant was talking about--and she couldn’t bring herself to say so.

The problem is more personal than bad breath or an unzipped fly: how to tell strangers who are trying to speak English that theirs is an English we can’t understand? Often, we don’t. We take the path of least offense, perhaps going as far as to say “thank you,” hang up and call back later, hoping someone else will answer.

If you doubt that many newcomers long to learn English, drive past Evans Community Adult School in Downtown one evening, past people who get off work and then spend hours in class.

Yet after puberty, muscles that have formed one language for years cannot adapt easily to a new one--which is why we see 10-year-olds translating for the whole family. Even when we are speaking the same language, we are not necessarily communicating.

Prof. David Alan Stern, now at a New England college, used to coach actors’ accents until he got “more and more calls from junior VPs at banks who felt they would be senior VPs if their accents weren’t so heavy.”

He teaches what a book cannot: the phrasing and pacing of American English. Such nuances are what allow Robin Williams to pass off gibberish syllables as French or Russian. Our ears recognize the cadence and music of languages before they learn specific words.

Sometimes, our ears betray our eyes. A landlady told a prospective tenant that she wanted quiet tenants. “My children and I very choir,” the Guatemalan-born woman said. The landlady looked confused--”You sing in a choir?” Yet the woman’s body language could mean nothing else but “quiet.”

Not unexpectedly, “accent reduction” or “accent acquisition” treads near PC quicksand. One client of L.A. instructor Richard Bourell’s English-teaching videos was a government agency whose workers talk to the public by phone. There had been problems with accents. The agency put a notice about the videos in its newsletter and braced for howls about cultural insensitivity. Instead, about 50 employees signed up.

Ruth Forman teaches “communication enhancement” to Southland medical and business professionals whose intimate, urgent work hinges on language and cultural subtleties. An Asian radiologist who has lived in California for 17 years used to throw Forman’s flyers in the trash, telling himself, “I don’t need it. I think I’m good enough to perform my professional duties.”

But two incidents changed his mind. First, his hospital installed a dictation system, and some colleagues couldn’t understand his reports. Then, he had to tell a patient’s family about a malignant tumor. “I realized some of the words I couldn’t pronounce. Their facial expressions said, ‘What is he talking about?’ In that very critical situation, my problem made it even worse.”

If his problem were ours, would we be as assiduous about fixing it?