Heaps Easy As, Bro

Heaps easy as, bro.

This phrase was the name of one of the routes at a climbing gym, and while it may sound like unintelligible gibberish, it is actually a logical, if slightly exaggerated, Kiwi phrase.

Now, I wrote a post about trying to understand Italian, and Kiwi, obviously, is much easier, but for something that is actually English, there are surprising number of moments when I don't understand what someone is saying.

Kiwi bird approves these translations.

I'll throw out a few examples**

"Bring your togs and jandals this weekend."

Togs is the generic term for a swimming suit. Jandals=Sandals.

"Be careful driving on the loose metal"

I was genuinely terrified the first time someone told me this. I imagined scrap metal flying all around me, but fortunately, it just means gravel.

"Oh yeah the water there is mean."

Mean and Mint are all alternates to cool. Mean gets used the same way "wicked" gets used. And mint seems to be more like "awesome."

That's not to say that they don't use "cool" or "awesome;" they just also use these other things

"He lives in this posh as house."

In Kiwi, for whatever reason, they add "as" on to a lot of their descriptions. So really, this quote just means he lives in a posh house. Sweet as means cool and/or sweet.

So back to the title of the blog, heaps is what they use instead of "a lot" or "a ton." easy as just means easy. And bro is a way less douchier thing to say here. So basically it means "really easy, man."

One thing that was a bit startling to me was that the "n" word is not really as taboo as it is in the US. It's not exactly a polite word, but you also aren't the worst sort of person if you're white and you say it. But it's still not something I like to hear. I think given the lack of historical context and black people in general, it doesn't matter as much. (That's not to say that NZ isn't diverse. It is. The diversity is just more Maori, Asians, Brits and Pacific Islanders)

On the flip side, "granola" isn't a word here. I've said it a few times and people have NO CLUE what I'm talking about. They call it muesli. There actually is a slight difference between the two, muesli tends to be a lot healthier than granola (as is almost everything... I'll save that for a later blog though.)

So that is a few examples of the slang here. And even though I know or can use context clues to figure out most of it, I still have to contend with a very different accent.

If you want to hear what Kiwi sounds like, listen to this:

80 percent of the time I don't have any issues understand anything. But if the environment is loud or I'm distracted, I might have to ask someone to repeat what they're saying.

As an example:
Last night at dinner, I was so mentally exhausted that I couldn't understand anything my soft spoken waitress was saying. At one point she came over and said... I have no clue what. I just stared at her, trying to make sense of the sounds. Nothing. I asked her to repeat it. My brain couldn't even process it as a language. I felt like an idiot. And my friend across the table looked like he was concerned about my sanity. "What?" I asked again, this time to him. "Do you want dessert?"

It was embarrassing.

Now obviously this same concept holds true when I talk, but I find that native English speakers are a lot more familiar with American slang than we are of theirs. It's because books and movies will actually change or re-edit movies for American audiences and British or Kiwi slang gets changed into more recognizable forms.

So the fact that they are more well versed with the slang I use and the fact my accent lends itself to fully enunciating words and the kiwi accent definitely doesn't generally means I am slightly better understood than I understand people. Or at least that's my impression... I could be wrong.




**All translations were approved by a real, live Kiwi.