>>>>Our firm become a Microsoft partner. Today I needed to talk with a Microsoft worker from Ireland.
>>>>
>>>>He only asked me an ID number and a phone number and I difficulty understood him. He wasn't talking like in the films or non-english speakers. I went to Taiwan and I can talk with chinese people in english but I couldn't talk with him (Microsoft's worker) even only two words. :((
>>>
>>>Take heart, Metin. WE can't understand the Irish either! :-)
>>
>>Back in the mid-90s I worked in Manhattan and worked with an Irishman who came over weeks earlier with 3 of his cousins. We would sit around drinking lukewarm Guiness and they would talk on and on and I would constantly say, "Huh? What was that? Say that again." It took me months to understand most of what they were saying. And the drunker they got, the harder it was. His favorite phrase was, "Oh bullocks!" I think it's swearing, but since no one else knew what he meant, no offense was taken...
>
>Did you ever see the British film, "Snatch", with Brad Pitt as an Irish "tinker" bare-fist fighter, and London gangsters? Catch it - it's brilliant, very funny. Pitt is incomprehensible, like your buddies, and you'll probably find the London & cockney speech similar. The London boy star, don't know his name, is big in than new all-action US movie at the moment, about a guy with an adrenalin-related toxin in his blood.
>
>http://www.amazon.com/Snatch-Special-Brad-Pitt/dp/B00003CXS4


One of the hilarious things about the "Snatch" DVD is the option of turning on subtitles only when the "pikey" (Pitt) speaks. It wasn't as good as its predecessor IMO but it was a fun movie. Who knows where Guy Ritchie's head is now. He was such a promising young director -- "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" remains one of my favorites -- and then he hooked up with Madonna. The mating rituals of praying mantises come to mind for some reason.