3 ms·
To be fair, much of the gap with accents, is to do with exposure, in reality the majority of your media consumption in English is American English not West Midl
by DoingIsLearning 6y ago
To be fair, much of the gap with accents, is to do with exposure, in reality the majority of your media consumption in English is American English not West Midlands English.
Unfortunately the majority of native English speakers (not just from the UK) fail to realise that there is an 'international' business English which has significant differences from how they would speak 'back home'.
From the faux pas I've seen in international teams, my shortlist for the English native speakers:
1. Try to speak slowly and with diction
2. Avoid idiomatic expressions
3. Avoid phrasal verbs
4. Avoid Sarcasm (!)
Do that and 90% of miscommunication in an international setting is gone.
- wegs 6y agoThe bigger problem I have is building rapport. I work with a lot of near-native speakers, where we can understand each other, but we never get to that lively back-and-forth that comes in an L1 (or a fully fluent L2). It's not a question of relationships -- you can do that well with VERY little verbal. It's a question of nuanced, technical, back-and-forth. I can understand on a mile-high level that they used Python to build an ML system which can recognize whether something is or is not a hotdog, but we never get to the point of discussing finer points of algorithms, nuances of business models, or similar in-depth discussions. Some of these folks have lived in an English-native country for years, but it's just not quite there yet.