In my experience "Native Speakers" often don't understand each other correctly (of course random ones, from different parts of world) - plenty of tiny misunderstandings due to the tempo of conversation. 5 random non-native speakers may have all bad accents but they speak freely. When a native speaker joins the room the other 5 suddenly say they can't keep up and native speaker doesn't know how to fix that. I'm not even generalizing - seen it in practice many times.
I find it very true in daily technical conversations with other companies, conferences and on any type of trainings (online courses as well). Non native speakers tend to get to the point more easily. It's easier for themselves. Then don't try to dazzle you with funny wordplay and jokes that make no sense outside of speakers country. It takes a lot of skill for a native speaker to be pleasant for foreigners.
Interesting. I've noticed this, but have always attributed it to being a product of the British education that most of them received, being from Commonwealth countries.
> It's easier for themselves.
It's also much more clear. I tend to code switch into a more precise dialect when in a professional setting. The words I choose are often a bit more specific, but they're not unnecessarily "fancy" - they're just precisely what I'm trying to convey. I also speak slightly more slowly, with a more regular cadence, and consciously enunciate sounds (especially consonants) that I would otherwise abbreviate or omit entirely.
> Then don't try to dazzle you with funny wordplay and jokes that make no sense outside of speakers country.
I actually enjoy hearing those, but not while communicating a complex and/or abstract idea.
> It takes a lot of skill for a native speaker to be pleasant for foreigners.
This makes me wonder if I'm more or less difficult to understand than my peers for non-native speakers. Given that I live somewhere with a strong and distinctive accent, I would assume I'm more difficult to understand but that it's partially offset by my "professional voice".
The next time I speak with a colleague who is not a native English speaker, I'll ask them.
On your accent I would not care much. You should not try to change your accent for others and you don't need to. Speak slower. That's a number one hint. If you can't force yourself to simplify your vocabulary just be consistent with it - it will soon be clear from context what it means. Also feel free to rephrase and summarize once in a while as it is a way of implementing both of those hints.
A lot of courses on Coursera, Pluralsight or similar platforms utilize that consistently (Udemy is a mess of different approaches). Default speakers speed is super low, vocabulary is super consistent within a course. Course is painfully summarizing every few minutes, at the start of a chapter, end of it, every few chapters. I've seen complains about that, but it I think such repetition works.
I asked "cloud you please speak a bit slower" a few times when I was talking on the phone in US (calling a store, library, etc.) and people seldom complied. But that's a huge aid yet I ignored it until a pilot of a small, loud plane on my trip asked my party to "speak slower so we can understand each other". Communication was over headsets and apparently it's simply good practice regardless of the language.
On your vocabulary - "us Foreigners" may have learned English from same books or Cartoon Network shows. We often have issues with same vocabulary. You in one paragraph used:
convey, enunciate, consonants - I had to pause at those. I've been thought what a consonant is 25 years ago but used it maybe 10 times since then. My fault entirely, but still. Enunciate is completely new to me. Convey I figured out from context, I knew it only from context of "conveying a survey".
"professional setting", cadence, abbreviate - such use of "setting" would be understood by more advanced speakers, in my opinion. Others might treat "setting" as an option to tweak in yaml file. Cadence I know as it's a "bicycle thing", but I don't think all of my colleagues would grasp that at first read.
Abbreviate and omit - are one of those things I'm sure we were told in school about, but is used less often one might think. It should be clear if used consistently in a larger text.
To your point on vocab choice: if I use vocab not present/with different meaning in American English I would get blank stares so I often switch to the American term e.g. mobile phone vs cell phone. To your other point about local slang: I recently learned South Africans call traffic lights "robots", which I thought was fantastic.
But English speakers that I talked with (or listened to online) love actual wordplay. It's part of their culture. Tiny rhymes, replacing words with wrong ones that sound similar and "everyone knows what he meant".
Anything that you could comment as "pun intended" or "pun not intended" might be super hard to grasp for a foreigner. It often requires listener to know correct pronunciation and some phrasal verbs to get it and often knowing some facts from that country. I usually understand these things when said by Americans, but lack knowledge to understand similar "puns" by other nations. I know for a fact that most of my colleagues don't understand most of those. They might get that there was a joke there, but they won't know if it's commenting the topic positively or negatively.
Aye, we natives sometimes do. ;)
My morning pedantry complete, I shall stand aside while the next greater pedant corrects this comment. Let the games begin!
Maybe it'd be better to spell it 'degt'. Those consonants almost work smashed together, and 'deggit' or 'decked' would be confusing enough to get clarified.
edit: maybe people pronounce it like 'depth' with the 'th' replaced with a 't'?
Now you make me wonder if English speakers ever pronounce dept. literally.
Not often, but "dept" if sometimes used as a short form of "department" in written form, and I've heard people pronounce it literally before. It certainly can be pronounced distinctly from both "debt" and "depth" by native english speakers.
Yes, like that. Definitely not with a vowel. There's really no way to know for a non native speaker that the b is supposed to be silent, except by learning about it as a special case.
'pth' is different because the same stream of air can be used for both consonants, with the tongue contacting the teeth just as the lips open, so any gap between the consonants is not perceived to native listeners.
It'll probably sound like an accent to you, but then there are a thousand different native speaker accents, so that is OK with me.
For what it's worth, "bt" is not a common combination in my native Romanian either, but it is not hard to pronounce.
It can be done with lots of practice but native speakers don’t normally do this.
Heh, this seems like the right thing to do when you think about it. Why should we keep track of some odd rules that only exist for historical reasons and aren't really... you know, written down?
"Rare" can often be substituted by "seldom", but that doesn't work very well in restaurants. I like my steak medium-well anyway.
I have a hard time with the word "ineligible" - easy to read and write, but I just cannot say it without stumbling. No particular part of the word is hard either, it just... comes out wrong. I think it may be unusual way you turn it into syllables: in-el-i-gi-ble.