The Boy on Top
I used to be able to speak French pretty fluently. Unfortunately, I couldn't understand French people, except politicians, as they all spoke so fast! So they had to speak English to me anyway.
Lucky you. Did you ever live in France or is it a natural gift? TB
It's very diffiult to learn a language as an adult unless you immerse yourself in it for a while (reasonably easy) and then practice regularly with native speakers (much harder). So if you were visiting one country a lot (doing business or whatever) you might have half a chance. But if you visit lots of different non-English-speaking countries, how do you pick? and how do you make sure you get enough ongoing practice? especially when colleagues from different n-E-s countries tend to use English to communicate with eac other...
(They learned, btw, because they all started it in school at a young age, and because there was a clear motivation for them to want to learn a foreign language - the web, apart from anything else, and the employment opportunities - and it was a very clear choice as to which one.)
I was amased when I did my first international consulting assignment to find the board of a German bank holding their meeting in Enlgish, even though all of them where German. It wasn't because we where there. They found it a much easier language to transact business in because you can shorten meaning and don't have to finish sentences. TB
If Mandarin or Spanish wee the lingua franca, you would speak Mandarin or Spanish.
My view, FWIW, is that the contribution of native English speakers to international communication is to stop speaking native English and to start speaking international English. No difficult words. No puns. No complex sentence structures. No muttering. Jokes only if signalled with a big Joke label so everyone realises what they are (even if they don't quite get them). No slang, except possibly US slang. Often, if you can make your accent a little bit American it helps (because even in Europe so many of them have learned AmE not BrE). Recap and restate as much as possible. Watch carefully for the glaze of polite not-quite-comprehension and don't assume that communication has taken place.
I've watched negotiations between an American and a load of (Milanese) Italians get almost terminally bad-tempered simply because he didn't observe any of these rules and was convinced that they had agreed to things that they hadn't. Also someone with a strong Sydneyside accent totally baffle a roomful of Japanese (which he was alive to but couldn't help, so he switched to talking via me and the American in the room as though he was actually speaking another language).
Spot on. The biggest thing I find, is to sllloooww down and articulate your words. Try to avoid contractions, though oddly acronyms are part of international business english. I have a Canadian accent, which goes down very well (so long as I slow down and don't end sentances with "eh"). Some Yanks get it, far too many do not. I've seen some whoppers of miscomunication happen over the years... TB
I had a good ear and was good at grammar. For pronunciation, my teacher was Swiss and spoke beautiful French. But my vocabulary was a bit lacking, and my teacher enunciated very clearly and I couldn't understand the way 'real' people ran words together.
I did get an O level one year and an A level the next, but that was a long time ago. I've lost most of it now.
Well lucky you for getting to the point of speaking it. I'm told I have a horrible French Canadian accent, which sounds lovely to me but the Parisians hate... TB
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