Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s
If people from other countries are present English may well be used by everybody at the meeting. So it is quite possible for a meeting in Europe be taking place in English with no participants having English as a first language.
|
This is quite true! I remember a work (phone) meeting where I was there (American), my boss was there (Belgian - French was his native language), and we had other participants from China, India, Argentina and Singapore. We were all speaking English because that was the only language in common between all of us.
Since I am usually the jokester of a group, after a while I said
"Does anyone here understand what anyone else is saying?" I think this was the first thing that everyone actually understood. And the entire group broke out in laughter. We all worked together for many years after that. After that first phone call, we decided to have subsequent calls being audio plus sharing of computer screens (with a chat window to the side). We found that typing in what we were trying to express into chat helped immensely, because everybody could easily join in in real time and decipher as a group what one person was trying to say. We gave up the false pretense of pretending we could understand each other. That pretense was done for politeness, but it wasn't very functional. What's funny, is that after a few meetings it got to the point where we actually could understand each others speaking. We grew accustomed to pronunciations and weird ways of saying things. And after that, we were always just talking like a big family, with everybody relaxing and talking about their kids, what they liked to do, etc. No more pretense. No more failure to understand each other.
To this day I still sometimes get into a conversation with someone and they will say "I'm sorry, my English is not good." My response to that is always "You speak at least two languages. I speak only one. I respect you more than you should respect me." That usually breaks the ice and prevents any future expressions of embarrassment. And communication flows much better.