I have a friend from Italy who's living here in Hungary, and I also have a friend from Texas who's living in Hungary just to enjoy life a bit, since he has a passive income and can work from anywhere he wants. I introduced them to each other, and even though my Italian friend uses English in both work and daily life - He's a head chef at a fancy restaurant and he manages a staff of more than 80 people daily using only English, so his English is excellent -, he rarely consumes any American media and doesn't have any American friend, so he had a difficult time following what my American friend says.
For a lot of people, it's much easier to communicate with non-native speakers for several reasons. Just to mention some a few: they tend to speak more slowly, pronouncing every word clearly, and speak word for word, for the most part, avoiding connected speech.
So, my non-native English-speaking friend, don't be afraid that people won't understand you just because you have a Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, German, or any other accent! Your accent might actually help some people understand you better.
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Very good! And very true.
@CocoPop Thank you. Maybe I'm going to make a ToastMasters speech of this topic.
Things like this trigger me so much. We learn English to connect with the rest of the world only to find that the English-speaking world doesn't care if you understand. Say you're at a conference or university class and the lecturer/speaker has a thick accent. What do you do?
I call this local-default behaviour or local defaultism—which sounds better? It means that some (or most) native speakers will speak and interact with you as if you were from their area.
Local defaultism is exactly what we need here on Journaly (or in any controlled environment) because it helps you to get used to it. I've learned a lot from chatting with Uly. However, in my humble opinion, when local defaultism happens outside of controlled environments, it gets in the way of communication.
Sorry for the rant.
In short, I believe that native speakers should smooth their accents when interacting with non-native speakers.
If anyone finds this comment inappropriate, I have a ready excuse: I was just practising my ability to rant in English 😀.
I couldn't agree more, @Simone-. In my case as a hard-of-hearing person, this is one more reason to ask speakers of any language to slow down and enunciate. :)
@Simone- I couldn't agree with you more. I see it on Journaly all the time... people explaining things to users who have one or two bars for English as if they were talking to their next door neighbor, using slang, abbreviations, obscure expressions, etc. with no regard for the recipient's level of comprehension. It drives me crazy!
@Norbs maybe I'm going to = I might/may