Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

I'm not sure that Geordie counts as actual English, given that 80% of England (never mind the rest of the Anglosphere) can't understand it ;)

I once worked as a KP in the Isle of Man alongside cooks from Belfast, Glasgow and Sunderland. My Wurzel upbringing did not prepare me for this. Took me 3 weeks of repeated "what?" to begin to understand them. But I find that 30 years later, I can still understand them. Weird how that works.

Not sure if you'd like an advice or merely sharing your experience, but after reading your comment I spent an hour or so trying to provide a simple rule of thumb. To my surprise, I failed miserably. But I scraped some info together in the process, so I'll post it in a hope that it might give you a better perspective. Mind you, I'm not a linguist or a teacher.

First of all, I made a list of Russian я/мне lines with English translations next to them just to see if there is consistent presence of a hint in English lines that can point to the right Russian translation. There is none. So if you are trying to figure out the proper pronoun this way, you are doing it wrong.

To make an educated choice between я/мне you'll have to familiarise yourself with nominative and dative cases.

Here is some basic info on the cases in "question" and even more basic examples:

Nominative case of "I" is "я". Nominative case answers questions such as "who?" or "what?".

Кто пришёл? (Who came?) Я пришёл. (I came.)

Dative case of "I" is "мне". Dative case answers questions such as "to whom?" or "to what?".

Дать кому? (Give to whom?) Мне. (To me.)

As you might've noticed, native English speakers won't normally construct questions in a way they are constructed in most Russian cases, so I'd suggest to get familiar with cases and their respective questions first, and try to construct sentences later.

Or, depending on your goal, you can simply memorize common sentences/lines altogether and figure out why they work later.

Funny story while waiting in the Observation Area after getting the COVID vaccination:

In the first registration part, I discovered I didn't have an NHI number because I haven't been to a doctor. Therefore I was given a Post-It note on my consent form saying "Manual Entry".

After the jab, the observation nurses would call out names every few minutes: David, Priscilla, Marion, Yi Xin, Manuel, Daniel, Kyungbook, Richard... no surnames.

I didn't really think much of it. Besides, it was raining outside, I had my laptop, and I wasn't in a hurry to leave. When it was almost closing, there were only two of us left.

"Are you Manuel?" they asked. I said my name is Peter, not Manuel! But apparently they were calling "Manual". The Kiwi accent is hard to understand, even for a native speaker!

Serrano also seems completely off-kilter with his analysis of mixed competency group communication:

  "On the contrary, communication ends because [the foreign researchers] cannot explain to the American, in simple language, the advanced topics they were discussing. Yet, the American *takes over the conversation*."

Having been in engineering discussions where the language was not English, it is very noticeable to me that it takes longer for me to formulate a comment or reply. Native speakers are simply far faster to express themselves. When there are multiple native speakers the pace quickens.

Speaking simply, to the point and without jargon, is actually an advanced skill. When you don't know the word circle you say square and then hack at the corners with other words until the other person nods. Part of the reason why Zoom classes suck.

For the uninitiated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room