Timeline for How to tell speakers that their English is terrible?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
17 events
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| Oct 13, 2017 at 14:29 | comment | added | user73076 | @skymningen - And I can't wrap my head around how "if you want to be part of the international research community, you're going to have to get used to other people's accents" and "communicating technical material is the responsibility of both the speaker and the listener" are now somehow wildly controversial points of view. So I guess we're both confused. | |
| Oct 13, 2017 at 14:07 | comment | added | skymningen | I just cannot wrap around my head how it could be more reasonable to expect to an audience of people from a multitude of backgrounds to be able to understand every single dialect and usage of English than to expect from a (regular) speaker to improve their English so it adheres to one of the multiple understandable standards of using English as well as possible. I have learned multiple languages, but I will never be able to understand every single way that English can be spoken. | |
| Oct 9, 2017 at 5:25 | comment | added | Craig Hicks | @ruakh - In general to get that kind of position as a senior researcher requires unique specials skills and creativity. That talent is rare enough that spoken presentation is takes second precedence - although their written presentation is obviously good enough to pass review, get published, and be read - and that's what counts for researchers. I can understand the OPs frustration, but getting fixated on pronunciation, which I don't believe the speaker can change any more after15 years, is pointlessly obsessive. The OP might try becoming familiar with the speakers papers instead. | |
| Oct 9, 2017 at 5:12 | comment | added | Craig Hicks | The OPs complaint was pronunciation. The OP intends to tell the senior researcher that his pronunciation is unintelligible. My comments about were about presentations in general - things that could improve a native speakers presentation. So no, it does not seem contradictory. ----- While we're talking about contradictions, if you read my first comment it say this answer is "one perfectly VALID answer". From the OPs point of the OPs opinion is also perfectly VALID - he listened but couldn't understand anything. However, the OPs POV is also extremely narrow. | |
| Oct 7, 2017 at 23:07 | comment | added | ruakh | @CraigHicks: First you say that "the onus is on the listener" because the speaker can't do anything about it, then you give specific examples of what the speaker can do to improve it (more-informative visuals, slower speaking). Does this not seem contradictory to you? | |
| Oct 6, 2017 at 17:25 | comment | added | Craig Hicks | @mbrig - It doesn't surprise me that you know several actors who trained away an accent (or rather, learned a new accent) - those are people who are by nature language centric. But university/hospital researchers are not "a priori" language centric - they are chosen for research skills. So the researcher in question, after 15 years as a senior scientist, has 0% chance of meaningful further improvement in their pronunciation (rounded to units of 10%). The best they can do is improve the graphical presentation so that it gives a better clue about what is being said, and speak slowly. | |
| Oct 6, 2017 at 17:03 | comment | added | Craig Hicks | Certainly I have known people who have excellent ability to change their pronunciation. But I have gathered over a lifetime hundreds or thousands of non-native speaker data points in the US, the UK, and abroad in Europe and Asia. I had a brilliant engineering colleague in his twenties from Korea who lived in the US since he was 13 but sounded like he arrived yesterday. Yet in Asia I've met many Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese who speak perfect English who have never lived in an English speaking country. | |
| Oct 6, 2017 at 16:24 | comment | added | mbrig | If an entire audience fails to understand a presentation, it is the presenter, and not the audience that has a problem. I can also put in the effort to read poorly written papers, or densely packed slides (and I'm sure everyone has had a lot of practice with that), but that doesn't mean those things are not flawed. I'd also like to see a source for accents being impossible to change @Craig, since I'm (anecdotally) aware of several actors who trained away an accent when needed. | |
| Oct 6, 2017 at 6:54 | comment | added | Craig Hicks | I have to agree that this answer is one perfectly VALID answer. I spent my formative years in both the US and the UK and became adept at understanding a variety of English Language accents. Then in a US university I had a calculus TA with a thick French accent - he got massacred by the student reviews many of which said they couldn't understand him. But I understood every single word he said quite well. Conclusion: it is far easier to learn to understand foreign accents than it is to get rid of a foreign accent (usually impossible for males past puberty). The onus is on the listener. | |
| Oct 4, 2017 at 15:49 | comment | added | Igor Soloydenko | @dilletant Noone is saying that English is a property of UK, or US. But there's a line which separates a spoken language by a major fraction of language speakers vs one that's not. It's not about any kind of fairness. It's about integration by the means of lingua franca. If a speaker does not meet the "standards bar", he/she needs to change, not the listeners, because the communication protocol is broken on his/her side | |
| Oct 4, 2017 at 10:41 | comment | added | Jouni Sirén | International English is a language with easy spelling and difficult pronunciation. The key to understanding weird accents is that the pronunciation is often based on the spelling. As a grad student, I used to meet many people with nearly unintelligible accents. That doesn't happen as often anymore, as I got used to listening International English. These days I have more trouble with some native accents, if the speakers are not used to dealing with foreigners. | |
| Oct 4, 2017 at 9:45 | comment | added | gerrit | Although deciphering atrocious English pronunciations is indeed a skill that can be trained (learning the native language of the speaker helps), this post does not answer the question as posted. | |
| Oct 3, 2017 at 13:44 | comment | added | user73076 | Hi, @DanRomik ! In fact, I am. Effective communication - especially but not only international communication - requires genuine effort and practice on the part of both communicating parties. In the case of poor communication, it is much more common for both parties to be at fault. But practice can help! Best wishes. | |
| Oct 3, 2017 at 7:58 | comment | added | Dilettant | Well, world english is not a property of UK, US, or other countries where something similar is spoken. It is a new attempt to communicate with less friction. Subsets are important when being intersections, as they lead the way to better understanding. So, easing on what english you might be used to from where you come from, might be the way to go ;-) | |
| Oct 3, 2017 at 6:43 | comment | added | Dan Romik | Are you seriously blaming OP for not understanding the speaker's poor English (going so far as to insinuate that OP is suffering from a hearing disability and/or insensitivity to foreign cultures)? That is quite rude and inappropriate, and the fact that OP was himself/herself considering doing something similarly rude is no defense. -1 | |
| Oct 2, 2017 at 21:40 | history | edited | user73076 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 12 characters in body
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| Oct 2, 2017 at 21:06 | history | answered | user73076 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |