Comment by haspok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by haspok | Hacker News Reader

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> The younger Europeans I met were all very eager to learn English...

English IS the lingua franca in Europe, right now, at this moment, no question about it. Even the in remotest parts Generation Z and younger speak and understand a little bit, it is only the older folks who still remember the EU with borders are reluctant to speack anything else other than their own language.

And there are more and more people picking up a third language as they move around within the EU.

English is well suited for this lingua franca thing because at the beginner-to-mid level the syntax is simple, and you can get by with a few hundred words, much better than in other languages. Also there is a common pronounciation that is different for everyone (and reflects the mother tongue of the speaker heavily), but again, people speak slowly enough that it is possible to understand what they are trying to say.

Which cannot be said about the native speakers (coming from the UK, mostly), so the UK leaving us might actually improve the situation. No more awkward meetings where 20 people understand each other reasonably well, but not the single UK representative... (true story)

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.

The 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.

To be honest, the most disadvantaged are the native English speakers. Nobody understands them.

As a native English speaker, I would just like to apologize to all those learning English (as a second language) about the spelling business. We're not really sure how we messed that up so badly. Even the American efforts to improve it actually just made the situation more complicated.

> No more awkward meetings where 20 people understand each other reasonably well, but not the single UK representative... (true story)

I'm confused by this. Are you saying that the native English speaker in the room was the one having difficulty understanding what the other non-native speakers were saying?

This is generally true, native english speakers are usually less equipped to understand weird accents while non-native speakers are used to conversing with non-native speakers. non-native speakers are by definition bilingual which might help.

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