Northerners Complain about Brain Training

Before I left America six months ago, I informed my London-born bank teller that I ws headed for Yorkshire, to which he replied, “Good luck understanding a word they tell you.”

Apparently I’m not alone. Nintendo’s hit Brain Training is unable to decipher Northerners’ speech patterns as well. This, from Manchester-based DJ Michelle Livesey:

“Basically you have to say the different colours that flash up on the screen as quickly as possible. I’m saying, blue, blue, blue and it’s saying no, even though it was blue. Then it got to yellow. I’m going, ‘yeller’ and everyone’s saying to me you need to be a bit posher. You need to say, ‘yellow’ and as soon as I did, it picked it up.”

It’s taken me a while to get used to the grunting, bitten-off pidgin-English used in Yorkshire. It helps when they don’t cram four words into a single multisyllabled miasma (eg. “downterpub” = down to the pub), but the general pronunciation can be so far off what you might call “The King’s English” as well.

I have to sympathize with the creators of Brain Training. How can we expect the developers to come up with multiple translations within english? There are six or eight unique dialects within “Northern” speech alone.

Watchdog, a BBC consumer awareness show has picked up the story.

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