Non-native speakers navigate the world of 'good' and 'bad' English

Related discussion of this article’s sequel (556 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27220433

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.

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.

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.

You're right, and the HTML doc title is often a better choice. In this case it was more baity, though, so we swapped it out for the page heading.