Current Events > How do you communicate with people who have difficulty with English?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Kinda need advice

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depends on what their main language is.

If its something like spanish, i know enough basic spanish to stumble through a simple interaction.


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I raise my voice and speak slowly.
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Use common words and talk without slang or turns of phrase

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I'd go with option 1 until the point where it becomes clear to me that we're having difficulty communicating, at which point I'd switch to option 2

I feel like if people have difficulty understanding my english it wouldn't be because of word choice but rather because I tend to ramble, make weird run-on sentences that aren't real sentences, and so on. and fixing this takes enough effort for me that I wouldn't make it my default

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Try to speak their language if I know it. Or try to phrase things based on how they would have learned English, because there are a lot of common idiosyncrasies people pick up when learning English.

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I speak slowly and don't use colloquialisms

When I was learning spanish those things threw me off

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simplify and talk slowly.

things get much easier if try to take on their accent/pronunciation when you talk to them. A lot of people know English but were taught by people with their accent so their pronunciation is way different than ours. A lot of times they know the words you are speaking but they dont know our pronunciation.

ive spent a few months at a time in Thailand without speaking much Thai this is what worked for me

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Talk like sammy sosa

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I use pictures and gestures.

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speak slower and use a simpler vocabulary. Minimize use of contractions.

Run through the hypothetical of "If I pasted this into google translate, would they understand it in their native tongue"
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Speaking of google translate, if you are talking in person you can set it up to do conversations where you speak it translates it to their language, they speak back and translate into English

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Speak clearly and deliberately and avoid idiomatic language

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also avoid giving a million variants of a single thought in one go - if they don't understand then you might rephrase it but it gets confusing af really quick if you're like "the car, automobile, vehicle" every single time.

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Change my accent and scream at them

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