Who can't speak English in our squad?

[kippaxchris]

Just wondering which players in our squad still can't speak the language. Off the top of my head I have never heard an english interview with either Garcia, Silva, Aguero, Nastasic or Maicon but surely by now silva can speak the language and i'm assuming that nastasic can too being from serbia? Hoping someone on the forum will have either met one of these players recently or knows someone who works close to the players and can shed the light

I seen Silva the other week after the Ajax game and i said David can i get a picture and he said yes come over here

 

[liam81101]

I think Carlos not being able to speak English is a strange one given the number of years he's been here and when you think how good Zab's is - I would say Silva Aguero and possibly Garcia.

 

[blueday]

Sorry, I can not write well in English. I'm from the Canary Islands.

True, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, can be understood speaking their own language, provided they also speak out.

David Silva, understand English, you can even talk.

The problem is that David Silva is in the Canary Islands, the people living in the Canary Islands have a very different accent. You are used to hear people in Madrid speak English, is very different to hear a canary speak English.

Canarian people like David Silva, do not pronounce the "S" as it should, or differentiate the "Z" or the "C". So David Silva may be embarrassed to talk in English.

I hope you understand me.

Greetings from Arguineguin

Interesting, Thank you

 

[didactic]

Tevez can speak English just do not think he likes being interviewed in it.

 

[Stuey]

I think Carlos not being able to speak English is a strange one given the number of years he's been here and when you think how good Zab's is - I would say Silva Aguero and possibly Garcia.

Someone has not been reading the thread...

Given the Carlos-Shreeves interview, he seems like he would be generally quite fluent. He was quick in speaking and not really pausing to find words all that frequently.

However, I think generally you can't really associate expected language skills to the amount of time someone has been in a country. Some people are good at learning new languages, and some aren't. We don't know if Zabba took English at school/college, and Aguero/Silva/Tevez etc didn't. When Zabba came to City, his english was bad but given the speed in which he has become very fluent, I would guess he always knew english but just hadn't spoken and listened to it in a long while. I'd say Silva/Aguero/Tevez were not fluent before coming over, and as such are still learning and are not confident going on TV to be interviewed by someone with one of our many many accents that they may not understand and may be worried about just standing there looking stupid. You have to remember that coming to speak English in the UK is totally different than learning it in the US or even Canada. From my experience, many European countries' curriculums teach English with the help of predominant amounts of North American media as opposed to British media. I assume the same in all other parts of the non-english speaking world. Those are the accents to which a lot of European will understand as 'clear', and then they come to the UK where even native people sometimes have issues understanding each other (I know this is the same too in Japan, where accents and especially dialects are sometimes difficult for Japanese people to understand each other first time).
Case in point, my girlfriend is from Montreal - Francophone area surrounded by N.American anglophone territories and N.American media and accents, intonation and emphasis. Now, she was fluent in English before she came here, and graduated from one of the top uni's in N.Am where she studied purely in English, with absolutley no French used. She now lives in Edinburgh with me and sometimes she still has difficulty, even after a couple of years, understanding me and my Manc accent. My mom? My stepdad? She hasn't a clue what they're saying half the time. And yet, she's fluent in English to the point she takes oral and written exams in English rather than French these days...

It's really not as simple as saying 'Oh, he's been here 3+ years so he should be fluent'.