2y ago

How do i learn to understand AAVE better

Im autistic and have a hard time parsing spoken language. Unfortunately the only jobs available to me are customer facing jobs. I have a very very hard time understanding black customers, to the point where i sometimes have to call other employees over to help them instead because i seriously cannot understand them. Having to ask a customer to repeat themselves 3 times and then just giving them a blank stare has made customers very angry with me before.

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I have no knowledge of how or if autism affects this process. My suggestion is that you find video and audio content of people who speak english similarly to the people you are having a hard time understanding, then do a lot of listening. Talking to people in person is the best, video is good, audio is sufficient. Luckily people are really awesome, and have interesting things to say. Also their voices are pretty and nice to listen to. It is admirable that you see the problem as a deficiency in your ability to understand rather than as a failure of others to speak "properly". Don't be too hard on yourself though. People are going to speak the way they speak, and you can understand if you listen enough.
talk to more black people
Maybe correctly subtitled videos/shows/movies would be of some help? (I'm not sure it's aave or just baltimore accent, but wire s01 was close to incomprehensible for me sometimes, but got better by s3)
Find podcasts and livestreams where everyone is Black and try to go from there. The trick is you have to find one where all the hosts are Black and the guests they have on are mostly Black. A Black Youtuber or Twitch streamer is not as good because they'll often codeswitch since the audience is white.
Here's two:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC6o7j4ZNNziKnCyds8-XzA
https://blackmyths.libsyn.com/
These podcast/livestream also have good politics. You might have to spread out and find more liberal podcasts if these aren't enough.
Plz don't dox yourself but
Where you live will be the biggest factor in what type of ebonics you need to understand. If you live in St Louis listening to Black people from Baltimore isnt that effective.
I'd look up accent challenges for whatever city you live near and go through whatever channel posted it
- Midwest not chicago
Idk if you're the same as me but I learn languages and lects better if I learn the etymology and phonological background. Wiktionary is surprisingly a good resource for this. There are also articles and videos on AAVE as someone else mentioned. If you're really into it, you could read some linguistics papers too
Also get black friends and learn from them, linguistic fieldwork is as important as theory
The Wikipedia page has a phonology section that compares AAVE with General American English. I think that could help a lot since you'll recognize the patterns.
Learning accents sucks. I think you'll get it eventually with exposure but I do not know how autism might affect that. How long have you been exposed to AAVE? Took me about two months to competently understand Indian English when I was over there.
Before radio and cars, there used to be a lot more dialects of American English, some almost mutually unintelligible. There are some existing recordings of like, guys who lived their whole lives within a 50 mile radius in 1800s Appalachia. Impossible to understand. Except for AAVE, most of these regional accents have been flattened by national media. You could listen to historical recordings midway between AAVE and General American, but I think the most practical thing is just to listen to a lot of rap (from your city, because AAVE has regional accents too).
- For the most part every black person ive spoken to had code-switched to midwest english for me. Unironically the first time i had experience with black english for an extended period of time was GTA:San andreas which is, uh, rather old and made for a white audience anyway.
get your exposure up somehow, movies, TV, music.
maybe try speaking it yourself too, to help understand the rules and construction. in private/trusted company, you dont want to sound like youre mocking
- movies are not very good for this imo. There's this I wanna call it "white-facing AAVE" (I don't know if there's a more scholarly term for it) that media uses that's sort of halfway between the real thing and the standard transatlantic white media dialect. It's to give "authenticity" without being "scary." I find that this is especially true for Caribbean dialects, which are way harder to understand in real life than they are in movies.
  @OP: There's this youtube channel, CharlieBo313. His videos are kinda sensationalist in that the titles are always in all caps and trying to hammer home how dangerous the neighborhood is, etc, etc. But if you really want to hear street interviews with people casually speaking their regional dialects, it's a pretty good resource.

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