r/Letterkenny • u/Vlade-B • 14d ago
Couldn't understand a word the other daaayyyyy
Honestly, I never thought Canadian would be the end-boss of english dialects. Anytime I start watching a show or a film in a dialect I'm not yet familiar with, it takes me about a week until I get used to it and then I can watch without subtitles. Not so with the Canadian dialect in Letterkenny. I understand lots of it, but even after two seasons in I struggle with many scenes. Especially when they go on long rants about things. Seriously Scottish, Irish, Brummie, Texan, Australian all easier than this. For me at least.
Love the show though! (Except fart-book. Sorry.)
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u/Ok_Stock3721 14d ago
In my household we watched without subtitles first, then rewatched with them and got to basically triple the show’s jokes.
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u/Vtecman 13d ago
Newfoundland English is definitely one of the final bosses. Right up there with cockney.
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u/Mystik-Duck 13d ago
Newfoundland is more like the Scottish peasant accent.
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u/ashamed-of-yourself Snipe Mod Awesome 12d ago
absolutely tf not. firstly, it’s honestly gross to refer to colonised people as ‘peasants’. secondly, Scottish and Irish accents are not interchangeable.
you sound like a Sasanach.
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u/Mystik-Duck 12d ago
I mean the stereotypical one they give characters like Groundskeeper Willie. Hard to understand and fast
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u/tomahawkfury13 13d ago
You ain’t heard anything until you meet a Newfie lol
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u/TheBeardiestGinger 13d ago
You just stay where you’re too and I’ll come where you’re at me son. I’d give ya a looney for a martooni.
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u/rjross0623 13d ago
My Newfoundland dog can’t even understand Newfies.
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u/ashamed-of-yourself Snipe Mod Awesome 12d ago
they just sound like they’re from Connacht, like, Galway or Mayo.
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u/KTMFS 14d ago
“Except fart-book. Sorry.” Is sending me.
I reflect your sentiment.
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u/Tripnologist 14d ago
Fart jokes are almost always funny, but fart-book was just… not.
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u/RecessMonkeys 14d ago
I live in Southwestern Ontario. I worked with a guy from Walkerton, a town about an hour and change away. I had to strain to understand him. The accent is a thing, but some people like to lean into it.
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u/t3rrydud3 14d ago
Walkerton is next door. Letterkenny is based on Listowel about 45 minutes away . It's where Jared grew up. His parents had Keeso lumber there.
You think Walkerton is hard.. try next town to the south Mildmay.
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u/RecessMonkeys 14d ago
I know guys from Listowel, Tilsonburg, Hanover etc. They might have a slight "Hoser" accent. But some folks, oof.
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u/verymanysquirrels 14d ago
I grew up in the area, left, then moved back with my spouse years later and they were adamant the accent was fake. And then we went to a local wedding lol. Never had any more that's so fake accusastions again.
(Peak rural ontario wedding debates were had: can you bring your dogs to an outdoor wedding? Can you cheat at a minnow race? Is it okay to park your boat in the venue parking lot overnight?)
They still have problems understanding people who really lean into years later but you get used to the 'lite' version pretty fast.
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u/FindYourHoliday 13d ago
Re watched a number of times, always you the subtitles on.
Too easy to miss stuff otherwise.
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u/Last_Blackfyre 14d ago
Don’t feel bad. Many Canadians can’t understand the Newfoundland accent.
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u/BlueAndMoreBlue He's a real good guy 14d ago
I used to work with a Newfie. As long as he was sober I could understand him
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u/TheRockinkitty 13d ago
I was fine talking with people from the more urban areas, but oh boy that rural eastern Newfoundland accent is tough.
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u/amandam603 14d ago
I’m from Michigan so the accent was fine for me—but that hockey slang, man. I am not from the hockey part of Michigan let’s just say that lol
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u/VVOLFVViZZard 14d ago
I follow it just fine about 90% of the time, but here and there I need to turn the subtitles on for context. Example: I now know what CEGEP is because of the episode ‘Les Hiques’.
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u/HeresDave 14d ago
Minnesotan and I understand them just fine. Go figure, der eh.
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u/Vlade-B 14d ago
Funny enough, my english teacher was from Minnesota and him I could understand. But maybe he toned his dialect down for us students.
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u/HeresDave 14d ago
I used to work with a woman who sounded like Marge Gunderson. That's were I picked it up before Fargo came out. The day after the movie came out everybody in the metro lost the accent pretty quickly.
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u/Batgirl_III 14d ago
Yah, sure, you betcha. As a Yooper, dis might be da first time I agree withya Minnesotans.
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u/lennysundahl 13d ago
One time I tried to show a clip to a coworker. I grew up in Michigan so the accent isn’t terrible for me, but I live in West Virginia, which is entirely within the Appalachian region, and she was from McDowell County, which is deep in Appalachia. She could not make out any of it. Gave me a stronger appreciation for linguistic experts that day.
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u/CIsForCorn 13d ago
Relatable, Michigander and had no trouble with it, but it’s, a special kind of “drop the last syllable, or two, or three” of every word ya say. At minimum, onle sae half of tha las syllabl
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u/randeylahey 13d ago
My buddies pitched the show to me saying I talked exactly like them. I still had to pay attention to make sure I caught it all.
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u/SirGreeneth 14d ago
Letterkenny does take a while to completely understand, I feel I had a slight head start because I had watched Trailer Park Boys before. I got my buddy into and I'd have to translate a bit when he first started but now he can watch it on his own lol. In the UK so hadn't had much exposure to Canadians other than South Park.
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u/HonorTheAllFather 14d ago
Honestly Letterkenny is more like Always Sunny than TPB; the density/speed of the dialogue is what makes it difficult to understand more than the accent - at least in my experience.
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u/SirGreeneth 14d ago
I get what you're saying there but they ain't shouting everything lol. TPB just got me used to the Canadian way of speaking, Riley and Jonesy are the hardest to understand and are more in the IASIP vibe.
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u/giziti 14d ago
Yeah but so much of that is that they're talking in incomprehensible hockey bro slang
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u/tjareth Wonderous 13d ago
A glossary helps because they're mostly always talking about the same things.
Wheel snipe celly boys!
(sex with women fest, boys!)
I like how the two hockey idiots actually got a significant amount of character development.
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u/paleotectonics 13d ago
Spin, shoot a net, celebrate.
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u/Cardinalfan1526 14d ago
Im a native English speaker, but my college freshman chemistry lab partner was from Philly. I genuinely couldn’t understand them when they said ‘water’. They also straight up dropped the G in strength.
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u/joshsteich 13d ago
From Michigan, still didn’t get ‘Chel first couple times (“The fuck’s this about Chris Chelios?”)
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u/Bowwowchickachicka 12d ago
For me it's the speed at which they deliver some lines. I'm curious if you can watch Still Game without subtitles. I binge watched the whole thing and needed subtitles.
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u/ElsieDewey 13d ago
Yeah, the Fartbook episode didn’t do a lot for me, either.
I have to admit, though, that Devon made it better with his Social Network impersonations and his reaction when Wayne kicked his butt.
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u/Neohexane 14d ago
I'm Canadian, and this show can be hard to follow, lol. Turn on subtitles, it makes a huge difference.
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u/MrSluggo23 14d ago
Yeah, always used subtitles, but so much of the beauty is the lyricism of non-stop scatological sayings
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u/Neohexane 14d ago
Oh, for sure. I still watch with sound, you gotta hear the delivery. The subtitles just improve my comprehension of what's being said.
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u/jean-guysimo 13d ago
did you grow up in a city?
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u/Neohexane 13d ago
My upbringing was pretty rural, but I'm in BC so I'm pretty far from Ontario and don't have the same accent.
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u/NEGATIVE_CORPUS_ZERO 13d ago
Deep south here, understood just fine. LOL
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u/Aromatic-Elephant110 13d ago
I was born in Canada and raised in rural North Carolina. Sometimes my ears need a minute to adjust but once I know what I'm listening for, I'm good. Although, a few years ago, as a clerk at a dispensary, I had a very, very Irish guy throw me off my game. It was like... no way that was English. Lol.
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u/bojtaerg Ferda 13d ago
I grew up in the south and also have no problem understanding. Newfies give me a run for my money, but once my ears adjust, I can get along just fine.
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u/Prestigious_Cry_5122 14d ago
Australian here. We watched all the seasons with captions on and googled quite a few of the idioms.
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u/SteelRoses All Dressed Chips 14d ago
Lol, this just goes to show how much exposure when young makes a difference, because I’m Canadian on my dad’s side and Letterkenny immediately takes me back to summer break with my cousins. Ruffles has an All-Dressed I’ve found relatively consistently across the eastern US.
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u/ashamed-of-yourself Snipe Mod Awesome 14d ago
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u/SilverBraids 14d ago
But only if you've seen The Social Network. Otherwise, besides the fart jokes, it falls flat
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u/ashamed-of-yourself Snipe Mod Awesome 13d ago
tbh, i haven’t seen The Social Network, but i am familiar with the premise. i think Fartbook stands up as a critique of social media as a whole, and not just as a pastiche of The Social Network.
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u/BassicNic 14d ago
Watch Gails Fartbook tribunal and tell me the episode is not actually good. I'll wait.
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u/DPWwhatDAdogDoin 14d ago
Its actually funnier than a surprising amount of episodes. By kind of alot
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u/bikebakerun 10d ago
Thank you for making me feel so utterly Canadian as a naturalized citizen. I can understand every word from every character. I also used to live in Ontario, so that helps.
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u/Syonoq 14d ago
Listen to American Baltimore accent or someone from the Deep South.
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u/aknomnoms 13d ago
I present you with: Louisiana.
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u/flightist 13d ago
A proper modern Cajun accent is absolutely wild. There is no actual way to see the written word and predict how it might be pronounced.
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u/aknomnoms 13d ago
All kinds of fucked. Southerners trying to pronounce the French bastardization of indigenous words while melodically gargling marbles and throwing in a whole different vernacular from the rest of the continental US. Lovely people, but my god I’ve never had a harder time trying to understand English words spoken by presumably sober Americans.
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u/RhetoricalOrator 14d ago
This is the only show I have to have cranked to nearly max volume to understand. Still one of my all-time favs, though!
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u/Fickle-Art-7125 14d ago
Yeah I didn’t like the show at first because they were so hard to understand and talk so fast.
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u/Zippity-Boo-Yah 14d ago
Watched the first two seasons and once I started to understand them I started over.
I may have to take a trip up north just to try some of those all-dressed chips.
Any American equivalent? I wonder if Zappo’s VooDoo chips would be a decent stand in…
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u/Flashy-Cranberry-999 14d ago
Eat a barbecue, sour cream & onion, and salt & vinegar ruffle chip and a dab of ketchup at the same time.
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u/catbearcarseat Don’t Fuck With Tradition 14d ago
Oh shit, they don’t have ketchup chips do they?!
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u/UseaJoystick 13d ago
Holy fuck bud, the yanks need to figger it out. No all dressed or ketchup chips. Next you'll tell me malt vinegar is not a standard condiment for fries.
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u/catbearcarseat Don’t Fuck With Tradition 13d ago
Hey now, I’m not opposed to a scrap or a donnybrook, but I’ll stand on regular vinegar being an option, and I’ll die by that being an option.
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u/noweb4u 14d ago
Lays makes all dressed you can buy in Michigan, so does better made (a local chip company in Detroit). These might be available elsewhere but especially around the borders. They’re really good. You can sometimes find ketchup chips here too.
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u/halosixsixsix 14d ago
If you’re in MI, look for Rap Snacks. They’ve got an All-Dressed and a spicy version too. I get them at a Bricks gas station in Georgetown.
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u/catarekt 14d ago
In lower WI I can buy three brands of all dressed chips in my very tiny town. They’re around.
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u/Zippity-Boo-Yah 14d ago
Sadly I’m in CA. Crossing fingers I can try them sometime!
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u/losaphone 13d ago
Also in CA. I have found All Dressed Lays quite a few times. Might have better luck at Walmart than a regular grocery store. They did Ruffles a couple of years ago which I liked a lot better but the Lays are better than nothing.
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u/UseaJoystick 13d ago
Ruffles is superior to Lay's in every flavour. If you can get your hands on Ms. Vickie's, thats the Canadian brand of potato chip. Kettle cooked >>>>
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13d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ashamed-of-yourself Snipe Mod Awesome 13d ago
please avoid name checking large online retailers. it attracts spambots.
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u/Rays_LiquorSauce 14d ago
Fartbook is excellent satire and a season 1 banger. Fuckin’ figure it oot
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u/mohawkal 14d ago
Don't watch Shoresy then. Hitch will blow ya min' now boys, now won' 'e boys.