It's the <title> tag displayed in tab. It's the site's mistake that <title> and heading are different. But I don't feel this is a case of editorializing.
Most of the time, the non-native speakers learn English from the books instead of absorbing the local dialects/nuances since they don't hear people around them speaking English. However, depending on the quality of books / teachers, this means they pick-up a weird/artificial view of English (speaking is still difficult because you don't get to do it everyday - this is changing though). Then when one lands a job requiring English communication, they pick-up the "do the needful" type of oddities by observation/convention. So when they communicate with a native speaker, what comes across is a unique edition.
Interestingly, I can speak four languages (three fluently and one semi-fluently) and there is no equivalent of "do the needful" that is actually used in any of them - you just specify what is required - the closest non-specific equivalent I can think of is "take a look at it"/"take care of it"/"resolve it". God knows where that came from.
"do the needful" is found in British English books from the 19th century.[1] I suspect it's officialese that never went out of usage in bureaucratic and judicial circles in former colonies.
Sadly I also experienced a native (Canadian iirc) speaker mocking me for my pronunciation of 'power'. Indeed, I used heavy German accent on that specific situation, because I was excited at that moment. It shocked me quite a bit and I didn't know what to do back then.
Now I can laugh it off - English was my first foreign language but only one of three in total back then. And it must have sound funny (like Arnold Schwarzenegger), which I felt unnecessarily bad for.
Edit: I posted this story mostly because it really stuck in my head. It constantly reminds me to be aware of how I pronounce things. Before that incident I was quite confident about my English pronunciation, maybe even proud.
Many of us associate the accent exclusively with Arnold. LOL. Don't take it too personally. We like Arnolds accent and to us it sounds like all Germans are impersonating Arnold.
The problem I saw and still see is that it disqualified me from the whole discussion, despite having something 'valuable' to say.
But you are right, I don't take it personally (anymore) and actually can think back about this with a smile ony face.
As an American in Germany trying to speak German, I've made some effort to hide my accent. But then I think about Arnold and Werner Herzog. Would they be who they are without their accents in English? Then again, no one here has ever mocked the way I speak.
Our "Anglo" nations are mostly monolingual, but take it for granted that everyone else should speak English. As a result we sometimes forget how much effort was put into learning it, probably partly because we ourselves never achieved the equivalent.
It could be that your English is so good, that individual mistakes (here I'm going to be guilty of using an idiom) stick out like a sore thumb! You were probably right to be proud
This is absolutely right. It would be cruel and unusual to pick on some particular word when someone is clearly a beginner in English, but when they are otherwise very good and they make an incongruous mistake it grates. I think people feel better about correcting or good-naturedly making fun of errors like this because it's implied that "your English is so good it's funny that you got that one small thing toally wrong". Of course this is often not so well appreciated by the recipient for various reasons.
I've been guilty of doing this to my German friends, as well, but it's because I consider their English almost native level. It's the same to me as pointing out to a Texan that I find their pronunciation funny. In a strange way it's a compliment to them, but after reading your post I will remember to be more thoughtful about how things like that could be perceived.
Well, growing up in SJC/SV/SF, nonnative speakers were many: roommates, girlfriends, coworkers, and more. Heck, one of my first girlfriends and I could barely communicate verbally: but it wasn't really a problem when gestures, simple words, and "thought synchronization" explained ideas more efficiently and succinctly than learning each others' complex languages.
The other thing is immersion doesn't necessarily seem like a good predictor of language mastery: one roommate had trouble speaking English, despite living in the US for 10 years, while his older brother, who had never been to an English-speaking country before, sounded like he was completely American. This maybe anecdotal but there seems to be an incredible amount of variation in language and accent mastery that doesn't improve with experience (or above a fuzzy, certain age).
>there seems to be an incredible amount of variation in language and accent mastery that doesn't improve with experience (or above a fuzzy, certain age).
A friend of mine is Dutch, he moved to England to study for his master's degree, then to Germany for work.
His English sounds perfectly British (very neutral, though), his German sounds perfectly German.
Granted Dutch has elements of German and English in pronunciation and vocabulary, but it's still impressive how some can learn a language without accent, even at a higher age.
This is not a native/nonnative problem, but more a high vs low content languages, with native English being at the bottom of low content.
Low content tend to stay in the abstract, and leave out the details. High content give detailed descriptions and let the abstractions to be deduced by the listener.
This often leaves low content speakers wondering how things are being communicated, while they've had the issue described in great detail earlier, but incorrectly discarded the information as meaningless small talk.
High content speakers, on the other hand may struggle to decipher something that isn't really meant to communicate anything, or they may feel being kept in the dark and made guess then punished for guessing incorrectly.
Further problems are caused by figurative speech, as high content languages often use concrete analogies to convey something abstract, while low content speakers use abstract metaphors to convey something concrete. This also causes miscommunication, sometimes to the point of misinterpreting what is meant literally and what is meant to be figurative.
Interesting concept that I wasn’t familiar with. But for anyone else googling it, the concept is a spectrum of high vs low ‘context’ (not ‘content’) culture/language.
I changed it on purpose (such as low vs. high "bitrate" languages) because I feel the "context" explanation is a misinterpretation of what actually occurs.
As in the commonly discused example of saying "no": High content language speakers say no by giving an explanation of why fulfilling the request would be difficult (a relatively large amount information is transmitted) which, to their surprise, is taken as a yes by the low content speaker.
And adapting to this is difficult, because high content speakers prefer their information, while low content speakers feel inundated and prefer their simplicity.
> A group of nonnative English speakers is in a room .. then an American walks into the room .. understanding goes down.
I work in a research group with a lot of international people across Europe and elsewhere. As an American there for years, I got used to doing what they say here, speaking at the lowest common denominator, but when a new native English speaker (could be British or Australian too) enters, the same effect takes place.
Similar can be said of French (since my group is in France), all these non native speakers (myself included) exchange freely in terrible French but it all dries up with the first French person because largely they are mostly intolerant of poorly spoken French.
Still I think the skill of not judging and talking up and down the proficiency level according to the people you’re with can be learned fairly easily, if you get away from the idea that language proficiency reflects competence (in your domain of interest)
As a Russian I did a hitchhiking tour over Northern Europe when I was young, and while I gained some "fluency" in English as a result, the quality of my language use dropped noticeably. Not only because I was forced to use the first language construct I can pull from my head, but also I had to simplify it to be understood.
Being personally interested in equality, acceptance etc. etc. I find it sad to see more sophisticated language use dying off being replaced by a version optimized for ease of understanding by everyone.
I mostly meant English. Other languages probably simplify as well, but English does it much faster because of the scope of use by nonnative speakers. Same thing happened to Greek and Latin once
> it all dries up with the first French person because largely they are mostly intolerant of poorly spoken French
As a French person surrounded by non native speakers, I am sad to hear this. Many French people should quit their elitism with respect to the language and start bothering about the content instead. Languages are tools, not an end in themselves (they are also a very interesting topic).
It is still useful for non native speaker to be corrected and they usually appreciate it (foreigners has told me many times that French people don't correct them enough and they were happy I did). They usually want to improve! There are ways to do it without disrupting the conversation:
- come back to a mistake at a later point after the conversation is over - a correction should not interrupt the conversation taking place, except maybe for critical mistakes or to fix an ambiguity (and then it's often better to ask than to blindly correct, because it feels better for everybody and sometimes you are just wrong). It's already hard to speak in another language, it should be clear to everyone that making mistakes is not important. It's better to let people express themselves intuitively, smoothly, with mistakes, than a conversation where they have to think hard about the grammar and the language and where it is difficult to express themeself.
- pick frequent mistakes
- mistakes are a great opportunity to have interesting discussions about both the native language(s) of the speaker and the language being spoken. I've been learning many things thanks to this kind of discussions and they probably make me better in English.
- keep in mind that you are probably an absolute shit in the native language of the person compared to their level in yours, and they are actually doing very well.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with making language mistakes, don't be a dick about them.
I suspect most people agree with this, and I don’t personally encounter a lot who or elitist or dicks about it. What is most common, in my experience is a complete lack of effort to (a) interpret what a incorrect phrase might have meant and (b) avoid idiomatic yet superfluous choice of words. These are a lot obvious yet contribute significantly to the inclusivity of a conversation with non native speakers. This, surprising, given how welcoming France is of foreigners otherwise.
Sadly I gave up studying French and focused on Russian and German. I have experience in all countries and after being in France I was so disheartened I gave up. My uni grades for French reflect this :(
The joy of a Russian who hears you at least try to speak Russian vs. the French baker who barks at you in response in English
> the French baker who barks at you in response in English
Not the first time I hear this. Unfortunately there are still many places where people don't speak English or are plain hostile to English. It's probably improving as more and more people are far more exposed to English with TV shows and things like that than before.
Not all places are equal. For now, you are probably better off targeting a city where it is usual to have a lot of strangers, because there is a big university welcoming many foreign students for instance.
> The test also requires making a clear choice between British and American spelling and vocabulary. That "can trip up people whose English comes from various sources" — say, a third from British textbooks and two-thirds from American movies, Repečkaitė said.
As someone who had trouble learning English in class and ended up self-teaching using the Internet and reading English literature, I would have no hope of passing that test. Additionally I wouldn't be able to explain English grammar for the life of me.
However being multi-lingual and learning from multiple sources appears to do wonders for one's vocabulary - in pure vocabulary tests I tend to outscore native speakers.
I'd argue nobody anywhere has actually learned a language in class, ever. You pick it up by using it, and then may or may not remember all the arbitrary rules and restrictions that were taught in school.
I think that's especially silly, since (almost) everyone uses some combination of these two. Particularly in the rest of the Anglosphere each country's norm will have elements of both British and American conventions. Even in the UK and US different publications will have standards specifying the use of one or another spelling for "ise/ize" or "practice/practise" and things like that. It would be weird to mix dialect like "garbage can" and "dustbin" but spelling is absolutely fine (as long as you're consistent with each choice).
You made no mistakes in spelling or grammar in writing two short paragraphs and used quite complex vocabulary along with using one idiom and three complex sentence structures. Believe me you would not have any problems.
The author of the article is uninformed or lying. I would guess they just don’t know what they’re talking about but never rule out malice.
> In the TOEIC and TOEFL, the examiners are reading for content, and not specifically spelling mistakes. Your score will be lower if you misspell a word that is written in the question, or if you misspell the same word in different ways. As on the IELTS, your meaning must be clear.
> The answer to this question is actually really easy – it’s not very important.
> This does not mean that spelling is completely unimportant for TOEFL essays, but it’s only one part, and it is not one of the most important aspects. Most of the time, spelling does not cause any problems. The most important areas to pay attention to are usually others: structure, grammar, vocabulary, details, etc.
I got a really high score on IELTS (equivalent of C2) but I speak a mix of English from various places and my accent is also a random mix of American, British, Australian various European-but-non-native English accents and the accent from my native language.
Its very hard to keep British and American English apart as we don't know in many cases who wrote something on the Internet and we also read and listen to shows and YouTube videos from various places.
I’m not in the same boat as the folks in these articles who’ve clearly suffered much worse treatment. I had a relatively easy time. But personally, I hated it when someone complimented my English. It felt infantilising, like how it would feel if someone appreciated you for tying your shoelaces all by yourself.
The next time an American or British or Australian person tells me how good my English is, I’m telling them that “oh your English isn’t too bad either”.
You have to remember that to many of us Americans and Brits and Canadians, speaking any amount of any other language is impressive. We are comparing it to the 10 words we can speak of something else.
>It felt infantilising, like how it would feel if someone appreciated you for tying your shoelaces all by yourself.
I've been places (particularly Asia) where people were actually impressed that I learned a handful of words/phrases to be polite. Like do you think I'm too arrogant or stupid to take the time to learn a bit of a language that isn't English?
> "Professor C leaned back in his chair and repeated in a dramatic mock British accent, 'Intervene!' " The professor was drawing attention to Rodríguez's way of pronouncing the word.
> "Nowadays," Rodríguez notes, "I would have filed a grievance against [this professor] so heavy that he would have had to sell his soul to remain employed."
It must be fun to be a member of a humanities department today. I imagine everyone is surveilling everyone else for a slip up (microagression) in order to destroy them.
Tangential, but I can't imagine how Rodriguez was pronouncing intervene that would sound odd to an American. The British pronunciation, with or without the r, seems extremely close to standard "good" US English. I can imagine US dialects where it's slurred into something more like "innavene" but the professor was hardly mocking him for not speaking like that.
I have to disagree with you. That was not a slip up or a micro-aggression.
If you have a good friend who is foreign (or even just has a different regional accent) and you know they can take it as intended then it's okay to partake of a little light hearted mocking; but in an environment like that and with someone you don't know it's both highly unprofessional and tantamount to bullying.
At the very least someone should have pulled that professor aside and told him that his behaviour was not acceptable. There's a time and a place and that was not it.
As someone who struggled in university in another language, I am glad that this is not acceptable behavior anymore.
For me, this is something deeply personal. It took me a long time to be comfortable speaking another language and I can only imagine how they felt in that moment.
This is a step in the right direction and you should be fighting to keep your job if you find this kind of behavior acceptable.
I failed to find where this old quote came from, but I recall being taught that for practical purposes it's best to "Understand the long words but use the short ones" - even though it was intended for headlines and written communication, it's applicable to speech.
The article does seem to mix up "accent" with word use though (I was going to say "conflate" but then I'd fail the above rule!) Problems with word use seem much more legitimate to raise than accent - so long as an accent can be understood, it's rarely a problem and "correcting" it is rude and unnecessary, but in cases where word use is simply incorrect and confusing, it seems fair to try to get people on the right track (politely of course).
In my experience a number of these usage problems come from incorrectly inferring the meaning of a word commonly done by an overconfident speaker and much as being inclusive is nice if you use the wrong word that actually means something else it's not helpful for anyone's understanding, native or nonnative.
The main criticism I would have of the article is that it doesn't really support the case that nonnative understanding is undermined by the presence of native speakers - it feels like it's just taken as given because it's easily pointed to rather than having a basis in any serious evidence. It could quite easily be that without any native speakers the nonnative speakers merely think they all understand each other.
I've got a feeling that in the case of version/virgin it was more about the accent than the word choice. After all, in Russian it is almost the same: версия, but it has regular s. The way Russians tend to pronounce it may sound like a very hard "zh" making it close to "g" sound.
Also, it would be very sad to see idioms go. If one is learning a language they should learn its idioms too.
Every language has them and sometimes it is fun to see whether they are just a direct translations or something entirely different.
Something I notice as a nonnative speaker is that my fellow nonnative speakers often try really hard to sound British. They put more effort into sounding the right way than actually trying to use the language correctly and increasing their vocabulary.
Quite often people get praise for their "good" English because they've adopted a British accent even when their grammar isn't right or use words with the wrong meaning.
Personally I don't care if someone speaks English with a Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Indian, Swedish, or any other accent. Americans don't sound like Brits, Brits don't sound like Kiwis, Kiwis don't sound like Canadians, but they're all native speakers. I prefer someone who can communicate effectively in the language over someone who can fake an accent the best.
I don't think people should adjust themselves in their own country. They don't need to simplify their language just because there are immigrants, it is their own culture and day by day communication, requesting it will be rude. However when abroad they should adjust themselves to the other non native English speakers.
Also regarding English tests, it goes both ways, many Chinese students in Australia pass those tests but can't communicate in English to save their lives, let alone do an academic assignments.
I think people should adjust based on who they are talking to. If you are talking to someone with limited English skills, and you actually want to be understood, you'll adjust your manner of speaking. Where you are geographically seems irrelevant if the goal is communication.
As a non-native speaker, i rarely have an issue with advanced vocabulary or idioms from native speakers. The thing that is hard to me is understand heavy accents of other non-native speakers or local accents.
Also some ungrammatical constructions are hard to understand, e.g. when i first saw sentence with "your" instead of "you're" it took about minute to decode it.
Sometimes people can even feel embarrassed by their own/native language in a context where English is dominant, such as tech. I wrote about that feeling here: http://code-anth.xyz/posts
I have a kinda weird perspective on this seeing as I'm natively bilingual. At least for me seeing code in English feels fine while seeing code in my other native language would likely be a bit odd (at least theoretically, I don't think I've ever actually seen any code in it).
I feel like this phenomenon sorta extends past code in a way too, I would also find it a bit weird seeing information on my other hobbies that's not in English.
My wife is a non-native speaker of English. I understand what they're talking about but they're mixing up two separate things--language usage and accent.
She definitely has an accent but it rarely is an issue. (There are a few words that mess her up badly, though.)
Much more of an issue is language usage. She has learned the words she needs to communicate (but will often be tripped up by uncommon words) but fares poorly with the little words that glue the language together. A recent example, "I eat myself" instead of "I'll eat it myself". The important concepts are in what she said, but with the glue missing the meaning changes greatly. Another weak speaker would probably understand it fine as the important concepts are there and they would arrange them to fit (but occasionally misarrange), but a native speaker not used to it very well might have trouble.
There's also the issue of sentence complexity. Think of books for little kids, how everything is broken up into simple thoughts. If their language uses the same sentence structure as we do it wouldn't be a problem, but if it doesn't they won't be able to properly build a mental map of what the sentence is saying without bits hanging off until the end.
I used to say that if you told my wife that if you can get to it in one minute there is a million dollars in a box on the back right of the second shelf of the refrigerator that she would have no hope of getting it, but if you told her there is a million dollars in the refrigerator, on the second shelf, in the back right in a box she would go right to it.
Note how it's easier for us to process the first way of saying it, the second feels wrong. For her, however, the second is normal, the first leaves too many hanging bits and she wouldn't be able to follow it.
> "The receptionist gave me a sheet and asked me to write down my complaint," she said. "I told her that I did not have any complaint, and she looked kind of irritated and then she insisted that I wrote down anything that I can think of."
I’m always surprised that people can’t rephrase their sentences when someone doesn’t understand. How hard is it to say “oh no, not that kind of complaint! I mean symptoms like coughing or sneezing or a headache”.
As to what is good English? Consistent pronunciation (that’s what Hansen teaches). Everything else is negotiable, but decoding an inconsistent accent is very difficult for anyone to understand. And it’s not specific to non-native speakers… plenty of native speakers don’t use consistent pronunciation and it’s sometimes difficult to decode what they’re saying.
66 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadInterestingly, I can speak four languages (three fluently and one semi-fluently) and there is no equivalent of "do the needful" that is actually used in any of them - you just specify what is required - the closest non-specific equivalent I can think of is "take a look at it"/"take care of it"/"resolve it". God knows where that came from.
The guy worked at Spectra-Physics and drove a Wankel Mazda RX-7 that he backed-in to their garage.
[1] : https://www.google.com/search?q=%22do%20the%20needful%22&tbm...
Also: it's not common, but still acceptable and not weird at all in some languages, like the Portuguese "fazer o necessário".
Edit: I posted this story mostly because it really stuck in my head. It constantly reminds me to be aware of how I pronounce things. Before that incident I was quite confident about my English pronunciation, maybe even proud.
It could be that your English is so good, that individual mistakes (here I'm going to be guilty of using an idiom) stick out like a sore thumb! You were probably right to be proud
I am going to memorize this one.
The other thing is immersion doesn't necessarily seem like a good predictor of language mastery: one roommate had trouble speaking English, despite living in the US for 10 years, while his older brother, who had never been to an English-speaking country before, sounded like he was completely American. This maybe anecdotal but there seems to be an incredible amount of variation in language and accent mastery that doesn't improve with experience (or above a fuzzy, certain age).
A friend of mine is Dutch, he moved to England to study for his master's degree, then to Germany for work.
His English sounds perfectly British (very neutral, though), his German sounds perfectly German.
Granted Dutch has elements of German and English in pronunciation and vocabulary, but it's still impressive how some can learn a language without accent, even at a higher age.
Low content tend to stay in the abstract, and leave out the details. High content give detailed descriptions and let the abstractions to be deduced by the listener.
This often leaves low content speakers wondering how things are being communicated, while they've had the issue described in great detail earlier, but incorrectly discarded the information as meaningless small talk.
High content speakers, on the other hand may struggle to decipher something that isn't really meant to communicate anything, or they may feel being kept in the dark and made guess then punished for guessing incorrectly.
As in the commonly discused example of saying "no": High content language speakers say no by giving an explanation of why fulfilling the request would be difficult (a relatively large amount information is transmitted) which, to their surprise, is taken as a yes by the low content speaker.
And adapting to this is difficult, because high content speakers prefer their information, while low content speakers feel inundated and prefer their simplicity.
Although among technical literature I've most enjoyed the language of The C++ Programming Language by Stroustrup, and he's not a native speaker
I work in a research group with a lot of international people across Europe and elsewhere. As an American there for years, I got used to doing what they say here, speaking at the lowest common denominator, but when a new native English speaker (could be British or Australian too) enters, the same effect takes place.
Similar can be said of French (since my group is in France), all these non native speakers (myself included) exchange freely in terrible French but it all dries up with the first French person because largely they are mostly intolerant of poorly spoken French.
Still I think the skill of not judging and talking up and down the proficiency level according to the people you’re with can be learned fairly easily, if you get away from the idea that language proficiency reflects competence (in your domain of interest)
Being personally interested in equality, acceptance etc. etc. I find it sad to see more sophisticated language use dying off being replaced by a version optimized for ease of understanding by everyone.
As a French person surrounded by non native speakers, I am sad to hear this. Many French people should quit their elitism with respect to the language and start bothering about the content instead. Languages are tools, not an end in themselves (they are also a very interesting topic).
It is still useful for non native speaker to be corrected and they usually appreciate it (foreigners has told me many times that French people don't correct them enough and they were happy I did). They usually want to improve! There are ways to do it without disrupting the conversation:
- come back to a mistake at a later point after the conversation is over - a correction should not interrupt the conversation taking place, except maybe for critical mistakes or to fix an ambiguity (and then it's often better to ask than to blindly correct, because it feels better for everybody and sometimes you are just wrong). It's already hard to speak in another language, it should be clear to everyone that making mistakes is not important. It's better to let people express themselves intuitively, smoothly, with mistakes, than a conversation where they have to think hard about the grammar and the language and where it is difficult to express themeself.
- pick frequent mistakes
- mistakes are a great opportunity to have interesting discussions about both the native language(s) of the speaker and the language being spoken. I've been learning many things thanks to this kind of discussions and they probably make me better in English.
- keep in mind that you are probably an absolute shit in the native language of the person compared to their level in yours, and they are actually doing very well.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with making language mistakes, don't be a dick about them.
I suspect most people agree with this, and I don’t personally encounter a lot who or elitist or dicks about it. What is most common, in my experience is a complete lack of effort to (a) interpret what a incorrect phrase might have meant and (b) avoid idiomatic yet superfluous choice of words. These are a lot obvious yet contribute significantly to the inclusivity of a conversation with non native speakers. This, surprising, given how welcoming France is of foreigners otherwise.
Sadly I gave up studying French and focused on Russian and German. I have experience in all countries and after being in France I was so disheartened I gave up. My uni grades for French reflect this :(
The joy of a Russian who hears you at least try to speak Russian vs. the French baker who barks at you in response in English
Not the first time I hear this. Unfortunately there are still many places where people don't speak English or are plain hostile to English. It's probably improving as more and more people are far more exposed to English with TV shows and things like that than before.
Not all places are equal. For now, you are probably better off targeting a city where it is usual to have a lot of strangers, because there is a big university welcoming many foreign students for instance.
As someone who had trouble learning English in class and ended up self-teaching using the Internet and reading English literature, I would have no hope of passing that test. Additionally I wouldn't be able to explain English grammar for the life of me.
However being multi-lingual and learning from multiple sources appears to do wonders for one's vocabulary - in pure vocabulary tests I tend to outscore native speakers.
The author of the article is uninformed or lying. I would guess they just don’t know what they’re talking about but never rule out malice.
https://answers.scottsenglish.com/discussion/209/is-correct-....
> In the TOEIC and TOEFL, the examiners are reading for content, and not specifically spelling mistakes. Your score will be lower if you misspell a word that is written in the question, or if you misspell the same word in different ways. As on the IELTS, your meaning must be clear.
https://www.prepadviser.com/toefl/important-spelling-toefl-v...
> How Important is Spelling in TOEFL?
> The answer to this question is actually really easy – it’s not very important.
> This does not mean that spelling is completely unimportant for TOEFL essays, but it’s only one part, and it is not one of the most important aspects. Most of the time, spelling does not cause any problems. The most important areas to pay attention to are usually others: structure, grammar, vocabulary, details, etc.
Its very hard to keep British and American English apart as we don't know in many cases who wrote something on the Internet and we also read and listen to shows and YouTube videos from various places.
The next time an American or British or Australian person tells me how good my English is, I’m telling them that “oh your English isn’t too bad either”.
I've been places (particularly Asia) where people were actually impressed that I learned a handful of words/phrases to be polite. Like do you think I'm too arrogant or stupid to take the time to learn a bit of a language that isn't English?
> "Nowadays," Rodríguez notes, "I would have filed a grievance against [this professor] so heavy that he would have had to sell his soul to remain employed."
It must be fun to be a member of a humanities department today. I imagine everyone is surveilling everyone else for a slip up (microagression) in order to destroy them.
If you have a good friend who is foreign (or even just has a different regional accent) and you know they can take it as intended then it's okay to partake of a little light hearted mocking; but in an environment like that and with someone you don't know it's both highly unprofessional and tantamount to bullying.
At the very least someone should have pulled that professor aside and told him that his behaviour was not acceptable. There's a time and a place and that was not it.
As someone who struggled in university in another language, I am glad that this is not acceptable behavior anymore.
For me, this is something deeply personal. It took me a long time to be comfortable speaking another language and I can only imagine how they felt in that moment.
This is a step in the right direction and you should be fighting to keep your job if you find this kind of behavior acceptable.
The article does seem to mix up "accent" with word use though (I was going to say "conflate" but then I'd fail the above rule!) Problems with word use seem much more legitimate to raise than accent - so long as an accent can be understood, it's rarely a problem and "correcting" it is rude and unnecessary, but in cases where word use is simply incorrect and confusing, it seems fair to try to get people on the right track (politely of course).
In my experience a number of these usage problems come from incorrectly inferring the meaning of a word commonly done by an overconfident speaker and much as being inclusive is nice if you use the wrong word that actually means something else it's not helpful for anyone's understanding, native or nonnative.
The main criticism I would have of the article is that it doesn't really support the case that nonnative understanding is undermined by the presence of native speakers - it feels like it's just taken as given because it's easily pointed to rather than having a basis in any serious evidence. It could quite easily be that without any native speakers the nonnative speakers merely think they all understand each other.
Also, it would be very sad to see idioms go. If one is learning a language they should learn its idioms too. Every language has them and sometimes it is fun to see whether they are just a direct translations or something entirely different.
Quite often people get praise for their "good" English because they've adopted a British accent even when their grammar isn't right or use words with the wrong meaning.
Personally I don't care if someone speaks English with a Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Indian, Swedish, or any other accent. Americans don't sound like Brits, Brits don't sound like Kiwis, Kiwis don't sound like Canadians, but they're all native speakers. I prefer someone who can communicate effectively in the language over someone who can fake an accent the best.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Also regarding English tests, it goes both ways, many Chinese students in Australia pass those tests but can't communicate in English to save their lives, let alone do an academic assignments.
Also some ungrammatical constructions are hard to understand, e.g. when i first saw sentence with "your" instead of "you're" it took about minute to decode it.
I feel like this phenomenon sorta extends past code in a way too, I would also find it a bit weird seeing information on my other hobbies that's not in English.
She definitely has an accent but it rarely is an issue. (There are a few words that mess her up badly, though.)
Much more of an issue is language usage. She has learned the words she needs to communicate (but will often be tripped up by uncommon words) but fares poorly with the little words that glue the language together. A recent example, "I eat myself" instead of "I'll eat it myself". The important concepts are in what she said, but with the glue missing the meaning changes greatly. Another weak speaker would probably understand it fine as the important concepts are there and they would arrange them to fit (but occasionally misarrange), but a native speaker not used to it very well might have trouble.
There's also the issue of sentence complexity. Think of books for little kids, how everything is broken up into simple thoughts. If their language uses the same sentence structure as we do it wouldn't be a problem, but if it doesn't they won't be able to properly build a mental map of what the sentence is saying without bits hanging off until the end.
I used to say that if you told my wife that if you can get to it in one minute there is a million dollars in a box on the back right of the second shelf of the refrigerator that she would have no hope of getting it, but if you told her there is a million dollars in the refrigerator, on the second shelf, in the back right in a box she would go right to it.
Note how it's easier for us to process the first way of saying it, the second feels wrong. For her, however, the second is normal, the first leaves too many hanging bits and she wouldn't be able to follow it.
I’m always surprised that people can’t rephrase their sentences when someone doesn’t understand. How hard is it to say “oh no, not that kind of complaint! I mean symptoms like coughing or sneezing or a headache”.
As to what is good English? Consistent pronunciation (that’s what Hansen teaches). Everything else is negotiable, but decoding an inconsistent accent is very difficult for anyone to understand. And it’s not specific to non-native speakers… plenty of native speakers don’t use consistent pronunciation and it’s sometimes difficult to decode what they’re saying.