speaking to non-native english speakers

I'm asking this because to my knowledge a lot of people here know English as a second language. English is the only language I speak and I've known it for the better part of my entire life, so I don't really know anything about what its like to learn it after having spoken a different language from early childhood.

its a stereotypical American frustration that we occasionally have to endure interacting with someone who doesn't speak English as a first language, and barely knew enough to get American citizenship. Particularly on the phone with customer service, ordering food from a fast food restaurant, or when your cars collide and have to exchange insurance information.

so I ask, what are some tips for someone who only knows one language and knows it well, to be able to speak coherently to someone who is only a beginner? Lets say someone asked me for driving directions, how can I direct them to where they need to go without being too complex? When you learn English for the first time, what are some of the first words and phrases you learn, besides hello/goodbye, please/thank you, yes/no etc.?

You have to use the simplest term for a given "thing". For instance, if you want to direct someone somewhere, use "go forward, then go left" instead of "proceed forward until you encounter a turn to the left" etc. etc. Obviously I'm exaggerating, but you see what I mean.

40oz said:

When you learn English for the first time, what are some of the first words and phrases you learn, besides hello/goodbye, please/thank you, yes/no etc.?

In our country, learning a foreign language is compulsory since primary school. In 99% of cases, this foreign language is English.

As children (9-12yo), we started with these very basic words. Then we were learning vocabulary centered about common topics (food, clothing, school, city) and word classes (pronouns, adverbs), with minimum phrases to it. Just words on a level of a 3-year child, but it didn't feel easy for us anyway. We could only use present simple tense for many years.

In higher grades, we were repeating the similar topics (plus some more), adding more vocabulary and phrases, present continuous, past and future simple tenses, we were also reading simple stories and making dialogues. In higher grades, we were yet again repeating the topics and learning more vocabulary, passive and perfect tenses (which appeared absolutely confusing); reading slightly more elaborate stories and making dialogues.

At high school, it was yet another time the same principle, with more adult-like topics and accustomization for common real-life communication: casual chatting, asking for help, communicating with officers; and also stylistic writings (letters, essays, narrations). We were also listening to audio recordings of native speakers, and had to figure out informations from the context. It wasn't easy, mainly for the fact that we often didn't understand what the narrators were exactly saying if they weren't speaking slow enough. Plus practicing grammar - perfect tenses, conditional expressions and sequence of tenses. Even though we were practicing this a lot, all of us were regularly making lots of mistakes. Gramatical correctness has always depended on multiple factors and context, and up to this day, I can't say it's clear to me at all.

According to my school results, I wasn't a bad student. But according to my frequent confusion about English texts, and also the frequent gramatical errors I apparently make, my English is weak.

...

Well. When talking to a non-native English speaker, prepare for these possible problems: First, he won't understand the words you vocalize, unless you speak slow and clear enough. Second, he might get confused by an overly complicated sentence, using many words or a tense which is not "simple" or "simple continuous", or at worst "present perfect". And third, he might not comprehend advanced phrases, simply because he has never heard them. Avoid these, and it's a good start.

40oz said:

so I ask, what are some tips for someone who only knows one language and knows it well, to be able to speak coherently to someone who is only a beginner?

Back in high school my English teacher said that if we aren't confident enough in our English we should write our essays as if we were communicating with a 3-year-old. So that would be my recommendation as well: If the person you're talking with has only rudimentary English skills, then talk to him with language similar to what you'd use with a small child.

Jodwin said:

Back in high school my English teacher said that if we aren't confident enough in our English we should write our essays as if we were communicating with a 3-year-old.

This sounds like pretty solid advice. My experience (learning Italian) has been that I find it much easier to understand what the other person is saying if they speak slowly, clearly and only use simple words. I find it particularly problematic because Italians have their own dialects (which are actually completely independent languages) - often they're mixing in dialect words I don't know, or just not even really speaking Italian.

scifista42 said:

In our country, learning a foreign language is compulsory since primary school. In 99% of cases, this foreign language is English.

Ah, gonna call you out on that. English is surely dominant, but not that much. Keep in mind, we're economically heavily dependent on Germany, so many kids choose going with German. I bet that is doubly true in the border regions.

Things that do not work: speaking more loudly. Americans are loud enough at their default settings.

Speaking more slowly, pronouncing all syllables even the unstressed ones, and clearly separating between words, might help sometimes, if the people know the written words but not the pronunciation. Also try to speak in the Received Pronunciation accent, since it's the one most often used in schools. English has plenty of weird accents and it doesn't help much when you pronounce "five" as "foyv" for example.

Having a notebook on which you can write the words out, and maybe draw pictures, can help, too.

fraggle said:

I find it particularly problematic because Italians have their own dialects (which are actually completely independent languages)

Heh, that sounds a lot like German.

Regarding driving directions, it can help to reference landmarks rather than traffic signs. Everyone knows what a McDonalds look like, whereas if you tell the guy to turn at the light, he may not know what that word means.

From a Spanish-speaking perspective, I can say the problems are generally in three areas:

1-Pronuntiation. I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I generally don't have a lot of trouble listening to English or Australian people. But Americans (especially African-Americans) and Scots are almost incomprehensible for me. Americans (especially black people) should really try to speak slower when talking to a foreigner (note that I'm not saying that they should talk to me like if I was a little baby, just don't speak like if you were trying to set a record). Curiously, when it's me who is speaking, pronuntiation is almost never an issue, and I can practically always talk with native English speakers without a problem at all.
2-Synonyms. English has a lot of words that mean (almost exactly) the same. This was (and still is to some extent) one of the biggest obstacles I found while learning the language; sometimes I'm not sure how/where to use a given word or another. The same applies when listening.
3-(lack of) Regulation. Unlike most languages, in English there is no "central authority" that regulates the language. On one hand, this is good, as it gives English the possibility of being very "flexible", and is one of the reasons it is the "universal language". But on the other hand, people tend to "take too much liberty" when creating words (selfie, googling...), and some of them abuse acronyms. This makes it very difficult for us, like foreigners, to keep up to date. There's also the fact that English borrows a lot of words from other languages (something I feel it's unnecessary 90% of the time), so sometimes I have trouble trying to understand what is being said; then it turns out the person I was talking to was using loan words. That's frustrating, especially considering (point 2) the vast quantity of synonyms you already have.

Well, that's my take on the subject. I hope that answers, at least partially, your question(s).

Besides using simple sentence structures, speaking clearly/pronouncing words correctly is crucial. For example I have heard of incident where foreigner had to ask many times what native really was saying: He was saying "teen" but he pronounced it very sluggishly "ten". I have early become aware of the fact, the more languages you speak more easier it is to learn and understand new languages because of many similar words and also because they belong to the same language family

[QUOTE]Gez said:
Americans are loud enough at their default settings.

I agree --
I find that most of us (Americans) are just too LOUD. I've never understood why a simple conversation has to be a shouting contest.

Gez said:

Things that do not work: speaking more loudly. Americans are loud enough at their default settings.

Like in the good old days, when Britannia ruled the waves, and a lot of the dry bits as well. It was generally assumed that even in the Empire's remotest corners the natives understood English, though being naturally lazy or just plain insolent it often took a lot of shouting and gesticulating to get them to follow simple instructions.


Like most everyone else has said - speak slowly, clearly and keep it simple.

scifista42 said:

In our country, learning a foreign language is compulsory since primary school. In 99% of cases, this foreign language is English.

Try to do that (and/or teach metric) compulsorily (regardless of age) in the US and you'd have parents tearing out their hair. Why? I dunno, irrational hatred of doing anything foreign and/or different than they're used to.

I wish the education system were different in the US, we're far too behind in so many areas. We need well-funded 21st century education, not poorly-funded 20th century barely catching up to and fundamentally misunderstanding modern tech and its application.

Wow, everything is political for me, isn't it? Heh, I don't even know where I'm going with this.

Sodaholic said:

Try to do that (and/or teach metric) compulsorily (regardless of age) in the US and you'd have parents tearing out their hair. Why? I dunno, irrational hatred of doing anything foreign and/or different than they're used to.

Er... it already is. Foreign language and metric both.

chungy said:

Er... it already is. Foreign language and metric both.

Really? Which school districts? They never offered those when I was in elementary school (granted, this was many years ago) and my mom is a teacher, so I know they don't offer those to elementary level students where she works.

One thing I do know is that due to different policies the states can implement, quality of education and levels of funding can vary from state-to-state. Many schools are funded by taxes from the local property values, meaning that schools in poorer areas get badly funded vs. richer areas regardless of the size of the student body. Corrupt jerks like Ohio governor John Kasich tie teacher pay directly to student performance without regard to why those students may be performing poorly (there's a lot of reasons, really, including the whole system being shit).

I did have access to optional (and small) language courses since middle school, but it was only an intro to the language. As for metric, they barely touched on it. They were like "okay America's behind, here's the measurement system normal people use and the conversion rates you need to know but we give no incentive to actively switch over".

We need to educate for the future, not for current times. I feel that compulsory computer skill training is even more important than teaching language and metric. I have a whole slew of issues with American public education and this only barely touches the surface.

Fun trivia: the version of the imperial system the US uses is an outdated version of this already-outmoded scale. Britain updated it a few times since the American revolutionary war and all of the still-allied colonies updated with them, but America wasn't paying any attention and got stuck with a version that was only relevant at the time of the declaration of independence.

One of the problems I've seen with the American school system is simply the fact that it's compulsory. Meaning, a lot of kids who don't want to be there or have issues with schooling are still expected to continue their education, even when that's the last thing they want or need. My understanding is that in other places, if you're clearly not cut out for education, you go off to a technical school or something rather than completing a traditional high school education. I certainly think we need something like that here in the US.

I mean first off, because you're forcing so many students to be there who aren't even interested in an education, you've got behavioral problems up the wazoo. And of course it appears that our schools are failing when they're full of students who have neither the interest nor the skills to really succeed there. I'm not saying they're failures, but they may have schools better suited to a technical trade, rather than having them study advanced English or math. Yet we have this ass-backwards system where they're not cut out for those classes, and yet the schools are held accountable when those students fail to live up to unrealistic expectations. And what's more, those behavioral problems disrupt the learning process for students who are actually successful - to say nothing of the drain on resources dealing with those problem students.

I've worked several years as a teaching assistant, and while I've occasionally run into a bad teacher, 9 times out of 10, or even more, if there's a problem, it's a problem with the students, not that they're not being taught properly or what have you. It's not like "Oh, the teacher just didn't bother teaching algebra, or the Civil War, or whatever," it's that the students failing that stuff aren't cut out for those classes, and there's nothing teachers can really do about that.

chungy said:

Er... it already is. Foreign language and metric both.

I have to clear that up for the international members of this forum:

It's not nationally compulsory to learn a foreign language in the US. Foreign language classes are usually confined to two courses, like "Spanish I/II" and rarely anything more. It is only if you want to have any chance at college, does that matter.

Additionally, a lot of metric is learned in science courses due to necessity of the material. There are no "Metric system" classes(And on the subject of the Metric system,we don't exclusively use Imperial measurements in the US - Look on any cereal box for nutrition facts - those listings are all Metric).

I find it hilarious when I speak with a German and they assume that I'm German just because I speak the language. If I meet a German and they know right off the bat that I'm American, they always automatically assume I don't know diddly squat when it comes to their language. I generally use this to my advantage.

And as for the OP question, I find it easier when people talk slowly, use common expressions, and enunciate (speaking louder often helps to get rid of mumbling).

Teach all the swear words first. Giving and receiving driving instructions and talking to customer service should be easy after that.

You all ought to take a leaf out of Star Trek's book. Ensign Hoshi Sato knows three million languages and picks new ones up just by listening to aliens talk while they're having their dinner. And people here are whinging that they can't penetrate the Italian past-and-possible never-tense.

WHAT WOULD GENE RODDENBERRY THINK????!

My phone has a speech-to-text app on it, and I've found that it it will often misunderstand what I'm saying if I were to say, hold it up to my face while pretending to talk to another person. I've lately been very impressed with some of the words it recognizes when I take the time to pronounce each syllable. This is opposed to just kinda spitting the word out all at once to the point where it's only recognizable by people because there is no other word that would have sounded like that that would fit coherently in that sentence.

I was curious though, if there's like a scale of english word complexity or something.

Usually when saying something to somebody who doesn't speak much english, they usually say pretty skittishly "I do no understand." with little indication of what parts were misunderstood. Sometimes the meaning of the sentence is pretty clear, but they weren't able to understand it because of the arrangement of the sentence, or because I used a word synonymous with a better word that they didn't know about. At a very basic level, is the construction of an english sentence known? For example, would someone who knows little english be familiar with similes, or metaphors? prepositional phrases? stuff like that. It would be nice to have a conversation with someone even when their knowledge of the english language is limited. I feel Americans have a tendency to alienate people who don't speak the language and I personally don't want to contribute to that part our social norm and be more inviting to speak with someone so that they can get practice with it, I suppose. My brother in law is fluent in many languages and is dating a south korean girl and she speaks little english. She seems very outgoing and fun but sometimes she can look a bit ousted from the conversation because we're talking too fast and with too many "new words" like Zed described. I've had some conversations at work or in school where non-native english speakers had to excuse themselves because it was getting too difficult to understand us when we speak casually.

Thank you everyone for your input so far, it has been very helpful.

40oz said:

At a very basic level, is the construction of an english sentence known? For example, would someone who knows little english be familiar with similes, or metaphors? prepositional phrases? stuff like that.

At a basic level English has a fairly simple sentence structure: Subject-Verb-Object(-How-Where-When). For example, "John drives a car slowly on the street." You should definitely avoid using similes, and metaphors are an absolute no-no unless you're certain the other person is fluent in English. Using simple prepositional phrases should be safe, but again, avoid anything even remotely complicated. An other thing to consider with English is that you should avoid using contractions like "I've", "won't", "they'll" and so on. Not only can they be confusing if the other person isn't familiar with them, but they also make your speech harder to understand.

If you've never really listened to any foreign languages yourself then one thing you could try is this: Find foreign TV shows or vlogs or other videos on Youtube and listen to the people talking. Try to pick off words or sentences from casual speech - you should notice that it's not too easy. Instead the foreign speech can turn into an incomprehensible mess where you can't even tell syllables apart. That's how most basic English speakers feel too: It doesn't necessarily matter how good their overall knowledge of English is if they aren't familiar with how it sounds outside of a classroom. It's unfortunate that in most countries foreign TV shows are dubbed, because subbed TV is really a great source for getting a feel for how a language sounds.

According to my parents, I was actually fluent in Italian when I was a child. Both of my parents are Italian immigrants that came here in the 70s; English was not their first language. My mother, who went to school here can speak English and Italian fluently. My dad, who came here, after school knows English, but not as well as Italian. Moreover, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, who predominately know Italian rather than English.

Apparently, I had begun to forget how to speak Italian as I had begun to attend school. Moreover, it was not spoken in the house too often, (my parent's house). I still retained a good understanding of the language, but I can not speak fluently. Nevertheless, I managed pretty well when I traveled to Italy. But that could also be attributed to their quasi-understanding of English there as well.

At any rate, I earned A s in my Italian language classes in college. Though I have certainly forgot a great deal. Without repetition, I will end up forgetting what I've learned.

when you don't understand something have a recorder with Samuel Jackson's line from Pulp Fiction "English motherfucker, do you speak it?" and play it very loud to them.