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Yeah, part of the bargain of making English the international language is a shared understanding that bad English is good enough. It doesn’t fly in any other la
by theobeers 6y ago
Yeah, part of the bargain of making English the international language is a shared understanding that bad English is good enough. It doesn’t fly in any other language that I’ve used.
Sometimes I point this out to mollify friends who complain about English linguistic/cultural hegemony. The flip side is that, e.g., my French colleagues are much more able to insist upon standards in their mother tongue.
- nickkell 6y agoIt's a blessing and a curse. Being able to work almost anywhere in the world whilst speaking your first language is a privilege. Being replied to in terrible English after addressing somebody in their native language is very frustrating.
- sokoloff 6y agoI’ve gotten the “Please, sir, we do this in English” response most often in Paris, but I don’t get frustrated by it. I tried, but it wasn’t good enough. Fair enough.
- ghaff 6y agoAnd, even if not bad, relatively simple. If you do what I'll refer to as business writing, even if you don't totally dumb it down and chop it up into short sentences as tools like Grammarly will nag you to, your editor is still not going to want a lot of long sentences, "SAT words," complex tense structures, etc.