Not all English is the same
To many learners of English, it's easy to think that all native speakers have no trouble communicating with one another.
Well, it turns out that being a native English speaker from one country doesn't mean that you're able to perfectly understand a native English speaker from another country, and vice versa (反之亦然)
Take the UK and the US for example.
As a Briton, I grew up hearing American accents alongside British ones – on TV shows, movies and in songs. and how they would eat “cookies” instead of “biscuits”. And it took me a while to figure out that the “trunk” (n. 后备箱) of a car is what us Britons call its “boot”.
The confusion didn't stop at just vocabulary – For example, when talking about shopping malls, Americans pronounce it “mawl” instead of “mal”. And for some reason that's hard for Britons to understand, Americans remove the “H” sound from “herb”, pronouncing it “erb”.
These small differences may not change much in a day-to-day conversation between a Briton and an American. Recently, for example, an American friend told me that she liked my pants. “You can see them?” I asked, shocked. Pants means “underpants” to most British people, which explains my horror.
In the US, for example, a “bum” is a homeless person, while the same word in the UK is used to describe one's backside（n.臀部）.
And, more amusingly, “trump” was only ever really used as a verb in the UK – meaning “to pass gas” – until the US' current president came into the spotlight.
But as long as you can speak one version of English, it's easy enough to understand any other – and any confusion just makes your day more interesting.
A. English is changing as it spreads around the world.
B. After all, English is English, isn't it?
C. I soon noticed how Americans would put “gas” in their cars instead of “petrol” .
D. However, confusion can still happen every now and then.
E. There are different words that mean the difficult thing.
F. Some words can even be offensive (adj.无礼的) without you realizing it.
G. I discovered that many words are even pronounced differently.
