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>your colleagues don't have an obligation to you or the company to hold every conversation in English. English isn’t my first language (I struggled to learn En
by dnh44 4y ago
>your colleagues don't have an obligation to you or the company to hold every conversation in English.
English isn’t my first language (I struggled to learn English as a kid) and I rather heavily disagree with this statement.
There’s nothing about the situation that’s acceptable. Communicating well is arguably the most important thing in any knowledge workers job and this is already a difficult task for some people even when they all speak the same language.
Obviously in this case it’s valuable for the team to be able to explain things for the non English speaking employee but that shouldn’t turn into a situation where Mandarin becomes the default. Additionally they are doing a massive disservice to the employee who isn’t yet comfortable with English.
It should be possible for OP to express such a view from a position of strength without coming across as an asshole (https://youtu.be/HbvYeLxMKN8 https://youtu.be/HbvYeLxMKN8) and without feeling self conscious about it as many monoglots seem to be in these sorts of situations.
I’ve worked closely with a multinational technology company based out of Germany that had a lot of Spanish, Italian, and French speakers and there was most definitely an obligation to speak English, even at the headquarters in Germany where the number of native English speakers could be counted in single digits.
- jrs235 4y agoAdditionally, the speaker who has a hard time with English, I assume they understand it but might not know the "perfect" words to say, isn't going to get better without practice. While one could argue the OP should learn Mandarin, I'll hard disagree.
- fakedang 4y agoIn all of my former companies that I've worked at save for one (Japanese Bank), staff were forced to speak English even if one team member did not know their language. Internal communication about company stuff within teams had to be completely in English, even if the team was completely composed of people in one language. Even in the bank I interned at, they had to revert to English (or use a translator) if they needed to tell me something (even though I was making a conscious effort to learn the language). I can't really fathom a FAANG tolerating such flouting of social norms tbh. It's rude and unacceptable in so many ways.
- AlchemistCamp 4y agoEnglish is so much easier for native German speakers to learn than for native Chinese speakers that it's tough to draw many conclusions from that. Imagine you studied Chinese for years, moved to China for a job and struggled to read all the documents at work. Then a Japanese person mentioned how at their office at a subsidiary of a Chinese company, they all just read Chinese documents. While the rationale might be perfectly reasonable, you'd still need more time to adapt because you were crossing a much wider linguistic chasm.