Communication Solutions for Global Business

Speak Global English Video Series
Part 6 of 22:
How native and non-native speakers hear English

A lot of my clients come to me quite confused saying that some people understand them perfectly while others don’t seem to understand a word they say.

This divide is normally along the lines of native and non-native speakers. Jean-Paul Nerriere, a Frenchman living in Japan and working for IBM was one of the first people to recognize that non-native English speakers were actually able to understand each other better when they spoke to each other than when they spoke with native English speakers!

How could this be true when they were all speaking a foreign language? Well, most (not all, but most) native English speakers grow up hearing only one language — their own variety of English. Non-native speakers hear many different kinds of English as they learn the language, and therefore have a “better ear” when it comes to understanding others.

Native speakers also listen for subtle nuances of the language that non-native speakers don’t particularly care about. We listen for word stress and intonation patterns to give us more information. Non-native speakers ignore all of that to focus more on vocabulary.

So this is why we can end up having more miscommunication when native speakers are involved. We hear the English language differently.

This is why it’s just as important for native speakers to pay attention to their speech in international settings and also make an honest effort to understand others. Non-native speakers, I’ll also be sharing some tips with you in upcoming videos as to how you can speak in a way that native speakers can better understand.

If you’d your teams to start paying closer attention to their speech, visit

http://bit.ly/free8-partproncourse

http://facebook.com/globalspeechacademy

http://facebook.com/englishpronunciationlab

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Comments

  2. Heather Hansen

    It all depends on who you speak with on a regular basis. If you speak with
    native speakers the most, then the stress could be your problem. If you
    speak with other non-native speakers, it shouldn’t make much of a
    difference. Where do you live?

  4. Heather Hansen

    Very cool! I have family in NC! Ok then, really think about how you stress
    your words, and also, which words you stress in your sentences and where
    you pause. It’s possible you’re having more trouble with the patterning and
    flow of the language in your communication.

  7. Heather Hansen

    Hi Robert! Understanding is just one element of language mastery. If you
    can understand many varieties of English, that’s excellent, and it means
    you have good listening abilities. To “master” a language, you also need to
    think about your speech, pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Does
    everyone you speak with understand you as well as you understand them?

  8. Heather Hansen

    Do you mean the closed caption, Linh? Those are automated by YouTube and
    the system is still in beta. I haven’t uploaded a word-for-word transcript.
    If you’re referring to the written description under the video, it probably
    isn’t exact either. I usually deviate from things I write, or I write the
    description after filming, loosely basing it on what I said. Hope that
    clarifies. 🙂

  9. 123xxrobertx

    Well, I do hope so despite small mistakes here and there .On the other
    hand, it ‘s sometimes hard to be understood perfectly not being native.

  10. Heather Hansen

    Well, that’s where I come in!! I specialize in how people can be best
    understood by everyone, everywhere, every time. Native or non-native, all
    over the world. I hope you enjoy my other videos! I have a playlist on
    Global English that you might find interesting. 🙂

  16. heba sss

    At the beginning I thank you for your wonderful work. I am also non-native
    a speaker of English, when I listened to video absorbed and understood by
    75%, but I’m having a big problems which I can’t speak fluent English as
    well as rules grammatical . What can I do to improve mu language ?

  17. Matheus Valestra

    Hello Heather! Well, I´d like to respectfully add some things . It comes to
    me as no surprise. I understand that this situation only takes place when
    people from other countries that are talking (or trying to) in English to
    each other are actually not fluent english speakers. So, they tend to
    simply translate their languages into english making it easy to be
    understood by a fellow countryguy. Plus, there´s the speech rate that in
    latin languages (for instance) are very different. Cheers!

  18. ahepperl

    This makes total sense to me. I learned German as a second language and
    speaking with other non native German speakers from around the globe, where
    German was our only means of communication, was much easier than talking to
    a native German. You make the same mistakes, and often times have the same
    problems making yourself understood. In essence, it’s an understanding
    through misunderstanding.

  23. foreverblissful101

    like what some of the other people said below when I talk to foreigners
    usually stress isn’t the problem even if they get it wrong here and there,
    eventually the true meaning unfolds as they near the end of their sentence.
    However when they pronounce something completely wrong such as : Drapery vs
    Draapory(long a), that’s when I get confused. And also usually when they
    speak to foreigners, those foreigners make similar if not the same mistakes
    as them, which makes it sound comprehensible to the.

  25. Grgo Petrov

    Yeah, I’ve been always interested into this. But I think it’s simple. When
    we, non-native speakers, learn English and when we hear someone else, even
    though his grammar, pronunciation or spelling are not correct, we know what
    he/she meant to say as we had the same problem or we understand the point.
    There’s also example where in Croatian and Spanish there’s same logic in
    grammar structure but totally different in English, so we’d probably miss
    the correct English but understand each other well.

  34. WiggaMachiavelli

    I guess you’re speaking primarily about non-natives with a low level of
    proficiency.

    I also wonder if we might not find that native English-speakers who speak a
    second language are better able to communicate with non-native speakers of
    English – either through a better grasp of what aspects of communication
    are not language dependent, or through familiarity with non-native speakers
    of English gained in the process of learning their language.

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