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Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

bbc.com

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Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#11

Post by narag »

elmerfud wrote: post #2

I agree with this totally and I am a native English speaker. English often has many confusing and ambiguous terms that can only be known by having a very well developed sense of context. Have many non-native English speaking friends, I understand their difficulty with the language. When communicating with my friends I try and choose appropriate words to avoid misunderstanding until I can grasp the level at which they…

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned in any language-related discussion is that understanding is often a matter of discarding possible "neighbouring" meanings. To do that, you need to have a comprehensive knowledge of the language.

In English it's particularly bad because of the proximity between some vowels. In many cases a monosyllabic word is one of six or seven almost identical. And that's for basic vocabulary. Think bird, bear, beard, bore, bar, boar, beer, birth, born, burn, bier... when someone is whispering the words or talking over a noisy medium.

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#13

Post by david38 »

grawprog wrote: post #7

>The message, written in English, was sent by a native speaker to a colleague for whom English was a second language. Unsure of the word, the recipient found two contradictory meanings in his dictionary. He acted on the wrong one. >When such misunderstandings happen, it’s usually the native speakers who are to blame. So...somebody got a message they felt was ambiguous and confused them, didn't ask for clarification b…

This

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#14

Post by incrudible »

The gist here is that English needs to be dumbed down and stripped of any cultural references in order to be intelligible to an international business audience. No surprises there.

To say that "native English speakers are the world's worst communicators" is quite a bold claim. Personally, I'd give that title to native French speakers.

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#15

Post by vbezhenar »

My weird anecdote. English is a not native language for me (Russian is my native language) and I have issues listening to native English persons, but I have almost no issues listening to English with Russian accent. So, I guess, that depends on a receiving side.

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#17

Post by blunte »

This is clickbait. Much of what is presented as evidence of how bad native English speakers are would apply to people of other languages if they were the natives and English speakers were the guests.

But with respect to the one word financial loss, it sounds like the receiver is ultimately to blame because they chose to act without confirming the meaning of the original message.

Sure, the writer could have considered the ambiguity and been more specific or explicit, but the receiver made a choice and ran with it.

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#18

Post by bogle »

You can learn how to be better understood as a native speaker without having to go abroad or even speak to a lot of people using English as a second language. In the UK, live in a city like Birmingham, for instance, with a strong local accent and even, in some parts like the Black Country, a unique syntax, e.g. "How am ya?". Now go live for a while in, for the sake of argument, Glasgow, with their own particular patois and accent.

Why does this article make me think the problem is perhaps mainly with those native English speakers who haven't been exposed much to their own language as it's spoken in the regions?

Re: Native speakers are hard to understand in a lingua franca situation

#19

Post by david38 »

elmerfud wrote: post #2

I agree with this totally and I am a native English speaker. English often has many confusing and ambiguous terms that can only be known by having a very well developed sense of context. Have many non-native English speaking friends, I understand their difficulty with the language. When communicating with my friends I try and choose appropriate words to avoid misunderstanding until I can grasp the level at which they…

Have you ever been to France and tried speaking French after a few years of study? Have you ever had to deal with someone there who speaks far better English than you, but refuses to because of snobbery?

This article is trash

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