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My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message?

lewro.com

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Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message?

#11

Post by lewro »

timurlenk wrote: post #9

I've lived in London and in the US for a while and English is my third language (after Romanian and German). I'm quite proficient in English, not as good as my mother tongue, but I understand everything that is said to me and my vocabulary is quite extensive; however my accent is east-european with no doubt. What I've found out is that while Americans are a lot more insensitive (tolerant?) to broken accents the Briti…

Thanks Timur for your opinion.

I have to say I do not have a bad experience with English people. I am actually very fortunate that I have a lovely colleagues who accept my English.

The only criticism I get on social sites and via email. But as long as they are right I cant really complain.

Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message?

#12

Post by lewro »

angelbob wrote: post #10

The linked blog post is certainly quite acceptable, grammatically. Different audiences have different reactions to bad grammar. Financial professionals are put off by it, while teenagers expect it. Are you building ETrade, or MySpace? For something like ETrade, that's a handicap -- get an editor or a copywriter. For something like MySpace, you're fine.

Thanks Noah!

I am building project management application. I expect it to be used by freelancers and small companies. I guess it would be better if I hire someone.

I hope good copy-righter could help me to present the service in the right “light”.

Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message?

#15

Post by jimmyjim »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #2

Firstly, I most highly commend you for your existing use of English. It's not an easy language to learn, and the item you've pointed to is really rather good - I only spotted a few small errors that matter, and I'm very picky. It's certainly much, much better than I ever got at French, German, Danish, Swedish, Bulgarian or Spanish. Overall, they didn't really detract from the item. For many people it won't matter muc…

>I only spotted a few small errors that matter

Just out of curiosity, can you point out these errors?

Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message?

#17

Post by electromagnetic »

timurlenk wrote: post #9

I've lived in London and in the US for a while and English is my third language (after Romanian and German). I'm quite proficient in English, not as good as my mother tongue, but I understand everything that is said to me and my vocabulary is quite extensive; however my accent is east-european with no doubt. What I've found out is that while Americans are a lot more insensitive (tolerant?) to broken accents the Briti…

I'm a brit, and I have a very high tolerance to broken English, however I'm from the north where Scottish/Welsh/Irish and various non-English-speaking minorities are much more prevalent and where people generally take more time with people.

I wouldn't say Americans are more tolerant in general, however I suspect they are in the California area. I've met a lot of Americans who are very intolerant of broken accents, the same seems to go in Canada too (where I currently live). People in the Greater Toronto Area can be much more intolerant of accents, where as people from the Atlantic and Prairies seem much more tolerant.

I don't know what causes this intolerance, however I believe it may be caused by a lack of exposure to different accents. I tolerate accents very well and tend to have a chameleon-like ability when it comes to moving between areas. However, I regularly visited France growing up, I had Scottish + Welsh + Irish teachers throughout high school and have visited lots of European countries, so I wonder if it's simply due to lack of exposure.

Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message?

#18

Post by aquadoctorbob »

jimmyjim wrote: post #15
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #2

Firstly, I most highly commend you for your existing use of English. It's not an easy language to learn, and the item you've pointed to is really rather good - I only spotted a few small errors that matter, and I'm very picky. It's certainly much, much better than I ever got at French, German, Danish, Swedish, Bulgarian or Spanish. Overall, they didn't really detract from the item. For many people it won't matter muc…

>I only spotted a few small errors that matter Just out of curiosity, can you point out these errors?

I'm a native speaker of American English. It was certainly readable, but some of the sentence constructions were stilted enough to distract me. Here's my extremely pedantic edit, which also changes the tone to be more conversational:

http://pastebin.com/f4c49579f

HTH :)

Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message?

#19

Post by jimmyjim »

aquadoctorbob wrote: post #18
jimmyjim wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I only spotted a few small errors that matter Just out of curiosity, can you point out these errors?

I'm a native speaker of American English. It was certainly readable, but some of the sentence constructions were stilted enough to distract me. Here's my extremely pedantic edit, which also changes the tone to be more conversational: http://pastebin.com/f4c49579f HTH :)

Thanks!

And if anyone wishes to see the changes: paste both texts into http://www.quickdiff.com/index.php and hit 'Compare'

Okay, if any of you actually went through the exercise of pasting it onto quickdiff.com, you probably noticed how aggravating it was to copy & paste from that container. Really a bigger turn-off in terms of UI than his English skills, in my opinion.

Re: My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message?

#20

Post by quant18 »

Having some grammatical errors definitely sends a signal to your customers. If you're a large company, it just indicates sloppiness and lack of respect. But if you're a very small company, it's not necessarily a negative signal.

If I look at a bilingual website for a company I know is run by non-native English speakers, and the English version is error-free, that tells me it was probably translated by outsiders. Possibly the company doesn't even have the capacity to handle Anglophone customers (i.e. no internal staff sufficiently fluent in English to communicate with me), but just put up the English website to send a signal to impress their own-language customers with how "international" they are.

On the other hand, if I see some grammatical errors --- enough to be noticeable, but not so many as to entirely obscure the message --- it tells me they probably did it themselves. I.e. somewhere in the organisation there is some guy who speaks good enough English to describe their product. Maybe with a hellacious accent and horrible grammar, but at least I'll be able to communicate with him.

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