740. Are native English speakers bad communicators? (The Travel Adapter with Matt Halsdorff)

matt hello welcome on to the podcast yeah hello it's awesome to be here by the way um i'm an english teacher and so you have no idea how many times um my students mention your name here and there so it's strange to speak to you yeah randomly pops up have you heard that podcast with luke oh really yeah wow how nice it's weird people say that to me every now and then um and i'm always kind of like what really like i know that people out there listen to my podcast but then sometimes when someone says that like a person says oh yeah people mention your podcast all the time i'm kind of like what really people are actually talking about it i shouldn't know after it's been 12 years you know i suppose i am speaking with english learners all day so it's not like it comes up in a cafe with a random person but but yeah sometimes you're in a taxi in london a taxi driver so have you listened to that link's english podcast very good yeah so matt matt let me ask you the sort of basic um questions just to get to know you so uh where are you from how long have you been teaching and so on so we'll start with where are you from where are you from where am i from that's always an interesting question so where was i born i was born in california i'm from southern california that's where i grew up i went to to college to university and everything um yeah but then when i was around 20 in my early 20s i started traveling and i moved to europe kind of spontaneously without a plan um and i've been here for what since 2004 so almost 20 years a little under 20 years yeah i'm in italy in the northwest of italy um i lived in germany for six and a half years and then here in italy and i've been teaching that whole time teaching english yeah fantastic that's great wonderful what what's what's so appealing about europe or italy more specifically you know i think every place has their some adv advantages and disadvantages right um yeah why did i come to italy at the beginning i was very young i came because i was interested in history traveling i love culture and honestly in my early twenties i thought the girls were really pretty in italy i suppose that happened how many years you still think they're pretty yeah my wife's italian so i guess we can confirm that yeah okay so it wasn't planned let's say that was spontaneous i had gone to university to be a teacher i'm originally an elementary school teacher that was my plan um but at that point in my life i hadn't started doing that i had a chance to travel and i think that was the best education i ever got honestly was traveling around a bit yeah me too traveling teaching english to people from around the world yeah totally it just uh really helped me in many ways gave me skills and things communication skills and more right yeah and you know christian saunders you work together on the project that we're going to talk about how do you know christian so christian from kanguro english which he's been on your podcast what two times i think and i'm sure a lot of people know him um i knew him as well just as a youtube viewer i guess that may sound strange because you would think why is an english teacher watching other english teaching channels right but maybe because i need to improve my english but mostly because christian has a lot of content there where he speaks to linguists it's he speaks to people in the industry and um yeah whenever i i saw these videos i just was nodding my head a lot and like yeah i really agree with this guy and he has the same hairstyle as i do maybe that brought me to him yeah but um yeah then one day i saw him reading the dictionary for 20 hours or whatever it was he was doing this thing of raising money and reading the dictionary and yeah i saw he started this charity project where he was raising money to build a school in in laos and basically i thought that was cool and i got in contact with him in a roundabout way and i said uh yeah if you need any other teachers to help volunteer for this thing you're doing i'm here if you want and yeah i started volunteering for this group he has and that's how we got to know each other and eventually that's how we got into this project together yeah okay fantastic so the project that we're going to talk about is called the travel adapter um so what is it what is this project then tell us about the travel adapter yeah so i think the best way to explain this is maybe to describe a situation which i think a lot of the people listening to this are learning english and they may have experienced this situation so this is about native speakers adapting their english to an international group but but let me give you an image or paint a picture yeah create an image think that we're sitting in a international meeting right and we have two people from italy two from france two from brazil and they're communicating together um there are grammar mistakes flying around this room everywhere people are using their own i am agree right and uh it depends it depends of and all those classic mistakes yeah yes i presented i presented this yesterday whatever um there are lots of mistakes going on but so what this isn't an english class this isn't a standardized test these people are just trying to communicate as fast as they can probably because it's a work situation and they're doing a good job yeah they understand each other they find their way without a lot of problems most of the time despite the the so-called mistakes they are able to understand each other fine yeah right they're focused on communication which should be always our our first goal and it's working right but then let's imagine we have two people join the meeting the zoo meeting um and one's from i don't know from the uk and one's from california okay and these two people join it's you and me basically we join the meeting yeah we've heard that you're having a successful meeting we need to stop that yes we jump in and basically what happens it gets quiet everyone gets quiet people start to mute their microphones sometimes if we could observe them probably people close their eyes and they lean in towards their computer a little a little as they try to understand and the native speakers start to confuse people more than anyone else and because of that they start to dominate the call probably and they make a joke and only 20 percent of the people understand the native speakers basically are doing a lot of complex things that are confusing everyone and this travel after travel adapter idea is basically about helping them learn how to adapt to an international environment because uh research has shown and i imagine you as an english teacher maybe have seen this in your own experience that some of the worst communicators out there in an english environment group an international group of people speaking english very often are are you and me or us are the native speakers so that's what this project is about yeah so what is it that native speakers do wrong then i mean okay we should probably address already at the beginning i was going to address this question later but it's already in my mind which is the question of who is it that has the responsibility for a successful communication in this situation and if english is the language that's being spoken surely it should be the people who are learning it who have the responsibility to sort of get their english up to a decent level so that communication can be successful those are questions that uh i i just feel like i should put on the table right now because people will be thinking of them so who's responsible for the successful communication and shouldn't the learners of english learn english rather than the native speakers sort of simplifying their english and simplifying the english language yeah few things i think that's a good question and we should speak about it i don't think it's about simplifying as well which is another thing but we can come back to that um but it's communication right and communication is always a two-way dance it's always a two-way thing i think it's both of our responsibilities and the english learner should of course work on their english learn as much as they can and in fact they're already doing that i think most of the people listening to this have already spent hundreds if not thousands of hours probably working on their english to improve their english and if there's a gap in the middle let's say we're having miscommunication right um yeah the the english learners are building a bridge over this gap it's like in indiana jones and the temple of doom there's a long bridge that goes across a big gap and the english learners have are building a bridge they've been doing that all their lives as they're working there's crocodiles at the bottom as well don't forget there's a lot man eating crocodiles down there too so if the bridge fails then everyone's going to get eaten yes so this is important yeah we're all going to die or we'll get fired or we're going to have some big problem in a relationship or whatever it is um the the challenge is most of the time what's going on though and i don't think the native speakers are doing this out of you know malice which means to be evil or mean or something um or or anything like that but most of the time they're just sitting on their side of the canyon or the the river whatever it is and they're just hanging out they're just waiting for the english learner to come over and i think it's fair it is fair it would it's equal that they're at least putting a hand out maybe they're even building a little bit a bridge to meet in the middle and yeah so i think it's both of our responsibility should be anyways i don't know if it is today in many conversations but it should be i think we can come back to some of the wider issues and stuff later i think my original question before my before i changed my mind the original question i think was what is it specifically that native speakers are doing so first of all yes they're not sort of as you say extending a hand or building the bridge to meet in the middle but are there any sort of specific uh language related things that native speakers do that make things complicated for learners of english or non-native speakers i think we're doing a lot of things without realizing it that's the thing we're just unaware of it um for many other reasons um but yeah so just let's give an example let's let's take one example but there are many so it's not just that we are speaking too fast that could be a point could be it could be that we have a strong regional accent and we're not let's say changing that a little bit but those aren't the only reasons okay another example could be that we use uh lots of idioms so lots of expressions that are really confusing and if we just use a let's use a sports idiom for example like as an american i might say i'll take a rain check on that okay what the hell does that mean okay it means something very do you even know that one if i say i'll take it well i've heard that many times yeah i've heard it many many times in fact with my friends we find it to be kind of a kind of a funny phrase and we use it so let me take a rain check and what is a rain check i've known you checking the rain yeah i don't understand it and what that is is that it comes from the game of baseball of american baseball and a cultural thing from history and if it was raining they would cancel the game so they gave you a paper and you could come back to a future game for free basically okay okay so it's like a refund oh the check is literally the sorry the piece of paper uh with the that's like a ticket i see it right you could come back if it's a rainy day okay but so that's just an expression that maybe an american might use the thing is in our first language and this is valid for any first language by the way not only english in our first language we use a lot of complex vocabulary expressions idioms like that things referencing our culture and we don't think about it because of course we're just speaking fluently but those are really complex for people learning english i mean how many idioms are in the english language and everyone is learning those but there are thousands of them to learn right yeah um and even between us between uh an american speaker and somebody from the uk we also have sometimes some confusions there so if you use a cricket reference with me or a idiom i may have no idea what it means as well right we would joke about it but yeah i might use a qriket i mean i um i did an episode with my cousin who lives in california actually he works in a company out there and it was all about just moments when he said things and all the all his american colleagues have kind of gone what what do you want about like even stuff like idioms which we both understand but which are just not used for example he says yeah yeah you know i'm on the case don't worry guys i'm on the case i'm on the case meaning i'm gonna deal with it but apparently his american colleagues are like what you're on the case like sherlock holmes yeah like a detective investigating rather than just someone who is taking responsibility for something so yes even between british and american english uh we the idioms do cause confusion certainly yeah right sometimes um part of this travel adapter thing is trying to take to to let's say train or i don't know train is the right word but help the native speaker adapt and just be aware of that because most of us are not so um instead of saying i'll take a rain check on that i should say in an international group something like um yeah i'll return to that later i'll come back to you whatever i explain it in another way that's just simpler in an international group it's easier to understand or maybe i check do you know this expression have you ever heard this and then i i checked do you know what it means to be on the case and the guy will probably say no and then i can explain it if i want to yeah that's right i mean as english teachers for you know long time we've slowly just developed these skills bit by bit where you just naturally learn how to grade your english and you know communicate with people who who are learning the language but yes it's something that most i guess most native speakers unless they are unless they've had a long career internationally a lot of native speakers don't have to consider those things and then when they suddenly are all thrown into a meeting together yeah that's when things start to get a bit uh complicated right where did you learn this from i you learned this from from teaching i suppose i i did as well yeah that you would just say something and nobody would understand you you see it in their faces or you you hear it and you develop over a lot of time a kind of filter or radar or something in front of you that's there's this idiom coming towards you and you uh you take it and you adapt it or you avoid it yeah and i don't think that native speakers most native speakers have ever had that experience mainly because they have never learned another language okay um yeah and they haven't been in the international environment to to pick it up yeah that's right a lot of native speakers have got no idea what uh these non-native speakers are actually going through and what it feels like to be in that situation where you're in a meeting trying to do it in another language i mean most native speakers are spoiled by the by privilege by the fact that english is the uh is the lingua franca and so then you know english people or american people don't really feel the need to learn languages and so they are not very i wouldn't say it's not the word sympathetic but they just don't really know what the other people are going through that how how uh how much pressure and how uh horrible it can be when you're trying to communicate in another language they've never had that experience right which i think both of us have had you've had it with french right i've had it with italian or german and all of our english learners have had it where you're sitting with a group and you just don't understand or maybe you do but you're too slow to speak so you feel very frustrated and that feeling is a really important feeling to experience and we need to remember that most native english speakers simply have never they've never had that feeling um yeah they're just not aware of it exactly they could imagine it but they're just not aware of it yeah right yeah i mean it is a thing to experience i mean again you can imagine it but actually experiencing it it's quite a visceral feeling of confusion and doubt and suddenly a lot of pressure like you talked about building the bridge like learners of english definitely take a ton of responsibility because they feel really self-conscious about their english they feel a great deal of pressure uh to to understand and to be understood and all these these strong feelings whereas native speakers just like oh it's just another day at the office you know they don't sort of feel the same level of of pressure right so i think that native speakers don't always know as you said i mean there's the idioms and stuff but there are other things too right that native speakers might not realize what it is about english that's difficult right right i think another reason here why we are bad at maybe what we're not very good at adapting right um not only have we never learned another language but most english speakers have never learned very much about english itself and um because in our school system we don't study i think it's shocking for many of my italian students to or german students to hear that yeah i never studied grammar in my school in the us and i went to university and all you know and we never spoke about present perfect um even if you even if i wanted to adapt my grammar let me say i've never learned my own grammar so that's also another challenge and another reason why it's maybe hard to adapt so another problem another challenge that we present very often are using phrasal verbs right and every english learner knows phrasal verbs can make you go crazy just give in give up give out oh my god i have to put this together like two legos and make a you know match that together that's something that's really complex about the english language for most learners and as an english speaker i think most english speakers have no idea what a phrasal verb is no no so if i tell you don't use phrasal verbs try to avoid them because they're very confusing yeah that's really hard because the english speaker doesn't even know what a phrasal verb is really and also the thing about phrasal verbs is that some native speakers might assume that those phrases are easier than their equivalents because what the way it works with nate with uh phrasal verbs is that usually you've got in english you've got the phrasal verb and then the sort of uh single verb equivalent and the single verb equivalent is often going to be a longer verb probably with a latin origin and a bit more formal so you've got let's say formal and informal and i mean it's a bit basic to say it but often the phrasal verbs are slightly less formal and they have a short verb and then some kind of particle and the short verbs are typically things like get or pick or you know run or short little words like that and then the other ones are the more difficult words right but certainly if you are speaking to people who have you know if if you're speaking to french or italian or portuguese speakers um those quote unquote difficult words are actually the easier words for them uh but a native speaker might assume well if i am using these little words like cut pick get and so on that that is easier but if you know if you're filling your english with what i guess what you could describe as delexicalized verbs verbs that don't have a lot of clear meaning verbs that could mean anything if you just you know depending on the way you combine them with other words that could mean anything so if you're using phrases like get into get through to get out you know get around to copy me in on you know all those sorts of things then again a native speaker might assume that the the short words are the simple words these are the easy words and the big words are complicated but actually it's the other way around a lot of the time a lot of learners of english need those big words because those are the ones that are the same in their language right i completely agree and if we think when we speak to children in the uh in english country english monolingual countries we use that like give up you know don't give up okay um yeah maybe i should say you know don't stop trying don't surrender whatever surrender whatever the the longer version would be but yeah we wouldn't say that normally we would normally in our spoken english use the phrasal verb option and that's why all of everyone is learning phrasal verbs all the time and you'll probably be doing that the rest of your life and that's okay yeah but um in my opinion if we're in an international group and everyone is using the word like distribute and not hand out or whatever it may be yeah if we as a native speaker can not always but sometimes adapt our language we would be easier to understand okay or even even just if you if those native speakers understand that this room of people they're going to understand distribute they're not going to understand hand out but this but handout is the phrase so in a way it's like native speakers as custodians of this language we also have to be a bit like english teachers everyone has to suddenly take on that responsibility so you would say let me just distribute these or actually would probably say let me just hand these out to you i'm just going to hand out these things being aware of it that they understand distribute but you don't want to use distribute because it sounds too formal right so you say hand out you know sometimes just that awareness can feed into your communication where you are looking at the language sort of the metacognitive side of it you know where you kind of are aware of the language that you're using that can make a huge difference to being understandable you know huge difference i think that little explaining let's say maybe if i'm aware of these things i use it naturally but when i catch myself using it i just have a one second explanation of whatever that means or i check with my listeners is that clear do you guys know that or um is it all good you know what do you understand by that i i ask them or i rephrase it as i'm speaking and that makes me so much more friendly it makes me so much more fair in a way in this conversation because i'm meeting people again in the middle i'm adapting okay yeah we talked about one of the reasons why native speakers don't adapt and it's because they aren't aware of what their counterparts are going through because they haven't learned the language they don't know english very well themselves but are there any other reasons why native speakers might be reluctant to adapt their speech let's see i think mostly in my experience with working with some native speakers it comes down to just being unaware because most people actually want to help i mean they want to communicate and if they also see that they can come adapt their language and it will go faster i mean that's better for them so i think it's mostly down to unawareness though i'm sure that there are some people out there who like to have the power because if you have the power of the language let's say in a business meeting i have a lot of power in many ways i can push you into a corner and block you into a way and make you feel frustrated and low and make you feel like you're not very intelligent because of the language and i could use that as a weapon okay we can use our language as a very very powerful weapon so are there people doing that probably i imagine in some negotiations there could be but i don't think that's the main thing absolutely i also think that to an extent native speakers uh don't want to simplify their speech and they don't well i say simplify yeah they don't want to simplify their speech they don't want to explain things because they don't want to put the other person out meaning they don't want to seem patronizing they don't want it to seem yeah mainly patronizing and i've seen this from native speakers communicating with non-native speakers and the non-native speakers are desperate for these native speakers to maybe speak more slowly or just to be a bit more clear just to help in the communication and they don't and and the learners of english get so frustrated why don't english people make more of an effort to communicate and i think it's because they the english speakers are self-conscious and they don't want to seem patronizing or rude it would be quite rude for me to talk to you like you know do you understand what i'm saying you know that uh native speakers perhaps don't want to come across as this kind of patronizing rude person but in fact it's much more helpful than it is offensive i think there's a balance there and i think speaking about that feeling is correct because um if you exaggerate this if you go too far let's say you you could run into that feeling but i'd also say it's from the second language speaker there of english to they need to speak together and find their good level so um you know it's if i think he's patronizing me i mean maybe he's actually trying to help you in a way and he's just unaware of how to do it maybe so i think that there needs to be some well it's helpful if there's communication between the two to find the good the good space um yeah but we need to be aware of that i don't want to call some maybe in someone's culture as well in some cultures there's an idea kind of a face or having uh you know looking good we all want to look good in front of our boss if the boss is in the room so if i ask someone did you understand that phrase they're probably going to say yes even if they didn't okay certainly in in some cultures yeah definitely so there needs to be a balance there and i think just having that communication between both sides and um finding the good place the good space it is like an adapter that's why we try to use this idea of an adapter so i need to read the person in front of me maybe in this case find a little bit their english level or the groups level and adapt correctly to that level we adapt all the time i mean think about when you speak to you have a a child right a small child yeah i do yeah your child three or four she's just three just three three let's say when you're speaking to your when you're speaking to your daughter you speak in one way when you speak to a waiter you speak to them in one way when you speak to your boss we speak to them in another way at a football stadium we speak in another way we're always adapting our language all the time in our first language depending on where we are and who's around us and this is just another setting if you want on this adapter so i don't think it's just simplifying your language would you say we simplify our language when we speak to children i don't know maybe we do in some ways but we adapt to them right yes we change to change our intonation when we talk to children everything sort of becomes a lot more you know everything gets higher it's like a totally different type of talking yeah so i think that um yeah in this case if we can avoid patronizing by adapting to to the right level but we need to know how to to read the level a little bit okay yeah do you find that i mean where are you with the project at this point i mean have you actually started training people with this or is it yeah so christian we we built this together let's say it came from multiple sources something i'm very interested he's interested in there's there's research on this as well we put that together and we've created a workshop we have a free pamphlet that has a lot of tips for native speakers but we've run a few workshops with it as well with native speakers and um it's very interesting to do that because i don't know luke if you realize as an english teacher you're really really an expert at this so um if you just take a group of random english speakers and you start to speak about this yeah they're interested in it most of them are interested in it and they're quite unaware i'd say of how to adapt what are some of the typical things that people have said in workshops things like um oh i never realized that oh that's not so difficult i just need to be aware of it or that opened my eyes a little bit things like this okay i've also heard i felt like i was speaking to them as a child one woman said and you know in the past i had to do an international thing and the interpreter told me to corrected me a little bit and told me to simplify and she said i felt like i was patronizing them like i was speaking to children you know i didn't want to do that um but now i see maybe i wasn't that that feeling wasn't exactly right i i was adapting my language to the group in a good way yeah that that that that uh thing about adapting especially to lower level people can be you're right it can be very difficult and i suppose it's one of the things i've developed over the 20 years of teaching but i i actually thinking back at my teaching career i think there were certain little breakthroughs you know you have little breakthroughs in your teaching where you feel like you've made progress and i definitely remember one of the breakthroughs i made was when i learned how to talk to lower level students without felt feeling like i was patronizing them and it takes a while where you can sort of speak in quite a serious way about serious things but you've learned how to adapt to your english and so and that's great like the learners absolutely love it they love it when you are able to talk to them clearly without it being patronizing it does happen does happen a lot that people will like and i've seen english teachers do this they're teaching lower level students so automatically they start to kind of baby them and it's like the way they communicate with them is it they slip into that child speak or whatever it is and that's that's horrible that must be horrible for the learners as well but yeah there's a it's a different thing talking simply and clearly i don't i keep saying simple but i mean just um choosing your words i think you can communicate really high level things and if we look in history we could look at many examples really deep high-level things using simple language using short compact language not just adding in a lot of sorry for the bad word or extra things that we don't need to put in there that are why are they there maybe it's just to show that i'm smart or something it maybe takes away from the message so a lot of the times in real life communication we don't need that that extra fluff if you want it depends always on our situation it depends what we're doing where we are am i speaking in front of a university or am i speaking to my colleague but most of the time we're just speaking with other friends colleagues co-workers things like that and so and it's not just about the words that you use but about all the other stuff all that non-verbal communication all those other things like um again you know thinking about myself in classes um it's about sort of really engaging with the people you're talking to and making eye contact with them and listening to them very carefully about really making that extra effort to engage with the people you're with rather than just thinking if i just choose the right words and put them in the right order that communication will succeed it's not just the right words in the right order it's about creating a connection with the people you're talking to and on a human level you know and um so those things and i think you again the awareness of what other people are going through when they're trying to speak your language helps to humanize you and then helps you to sort of essentially um kind of get closer to the people you're talking to and think about them and sympathize with them and and and so on i think it generally makes people more thoughtful i expect it's a human connection as you said this human connection that's the key there i mean i don't think we'll get this patronizing feeling if i'm being authentic and it's clear that um i respect you and i understand well for how difficult this can be and i'm i'm here to support you basically um i think then we we don't have to worry too much about the patronizing thing if i'm being authentic and human yeah i think that that yeah and voids a lot of them showing respect as well showing respect i think you know i don't know what do you think about even native speakers saying you know thank you very much for doing this in english i really appreciate it i feel like that would be a good thing to do probably little things like that or gold for anyone learning a language i mean if someone said that to me as i was trying to learn italian or german that just gives you such a smile it because you're doing so much work um but it's often unseen okay or you may feel like it's just expected somehow but actually you're doing really really a lot of work guys to learn a language is extremely complex it's one of the biggest things you could attack or try to learn in the world i think there's so much inside of it um so little comments like that are really really helpful little comments for a native speaker at the beginning of the meeting like let's okay if i'm speaking with a mixed group okay let's remember everyone we're in an international group let's slow down a little bit just little comments like that really really go a long way yeah yeah and even i hope you understand me please ask me if you'd like to if you'd like me to repeat something and there are many other things which i'm sure that you cover in in in your project you know it's also about things like um perhaps summarizing things that you've said right sort of clarifying by summing up one um very helpful thing to do in general as speaking um as a native english speaker an international group would be to rephrase things to use something called signposting which may be a new word for many people think of a signpost is that stick in the road that tells you paris is in 100 kilometers or what yeah when i'm speaking if i do that i say you know first we're going to speak about this um then i then i speak about it at the end i say okay now we're done speaking about this let's move on i'm thinking in a business context here okay let me summarize what we agreed on let me summarize what we said to be sure that it's okay every time i do that i give a chance i give a hand i open a door for anyone who didn't understand me to come in i'm kind of giving them the map if you want before we speak and it's so helpful to do that it's incredibly powerful to do that so add in those phrases i would add as well even i mean just thinking back to my experiences as a teacher that one of the most useful things is to to write the occasional word up on a screen or a board or something like that and also to pay a lot of attention to the people you're talking to so i will talk to my groups and i can just smell it because i as a teacher you know i've just learned but you can just you can smell when they haven't understood something you know you just say something and then none of you understood that did you and then you have to go through it again and sometimes the only thing they need is for the word to be written just that one word that they didn't get just write it and then they go oh like that and they all then understand it they know the word it's just the way it's being said that that has um you know stumped them to use a cricketing phrase yeah stump them so how could you adapt that to an international group what is to stomp someone mean stump to stump someone that's that's what's confused them or that's what has been very difficult for them right and we do this all the time i'm sure we have done it within our conversation here with two native speakers together you naturally just kind of motivate motivate each other to to use fluent language so um yeah then we use words like that and um that's exactly an obstacle it's like sometimes i think of it like in a video game where you're running and then there are holes you have to jump over or swing on a vine over or what and we're just throwing in a lot of different holes and there are many of them so by doing those those sign posting things those rephrasing by writing that word on the board by doing all of those things you're just presenting less holes to jump over okay what are more there are many other things another one i would say is um maybe with pronunciation which is just with actually our speaking um some things like we should try now we may know this but if we actually do it is another thing we should try to avoid saying things like ghana when i should say going to or or in it or um yeah i wanna when i could say want to now that's maybe not so easy to do but that's another helpful thing we should pronounce our consonants as well so um if i say next please but in reality and speaking we probably say next please where'd the tea go i eat the tea next please next please i don't say next next with the tea next please very often so we kind of we eat some of our consonants or we we erase them we we take them out and yeah if we're aware we may be able to put those in there again not to exaggerate it but maybe they're there so things like that yeah learning about how we connect all our words together how some sounds get collided yeah yeah yeah i think that most learners of english never studied i don't have lots of english books behind me but i don't think there are chapters about wanna gonna shoulda coulda woulda coulda all of that what you mean for english kids english i mean someone learning english is a second language yeah um no well it's it's it's not the primary thing that people learn i mean you know there's connected speech and all of the sort of features of natural english communication these are sort of in the sub category which some youtubers describe as secrets about language learning not that there are any secrets of course but this is the sort of stuff that you discover when you study english to a more academic level or when you get into a more advanced level you start to uncover these cool things like connected speech and weak forms and uh i think a lot of learners of english certainly the ones who get to a good level get to have a moment where they discover all this stuff about how the written word and the spoken word are totally different and about the ways in which like especially when you learn the phonemic script and you start to transcribe sentences into phonemic script then you start to see oh my goodness this whole sentence is more like one word really you know and things like that um so yes it's not the stuff that learners of english get at the beginning you know most learners of english are focused on grammar vocabulary reading writing you know those sorts of things they may think this is just slang in quotations the thing is when we're speaking um even very high level speakers of english go watch a presentation from steve jobs or who you want they'll use these things so it's not that this is slang it's not just in the street speaking to the drug dealer who are using these things no no no no these things are being used all over the place okay yeah honestly absolutely um um it relates to writing as well we're talking about using bullet points in emails use bullet points if you can't i mean i would say to a native speaker use bullet points when you can for so many reasons it just simplifies things and it just generally makes things easier to read nobody wants to get a big long paragraph of text they have to decipher i mean even in our first language we would prefer it to be in little chunks probably um as a second language speakers english learner it's it's difficult to go through all of that it's much easier if i have these things in bullet points where i could just have a quick answer i could focus on one little piece of language um it's much easier to present the language in an easier way here's the big thing in general i would say to a native speaker look you could speak fluently of course you can speak fluently it's your language i know but if you're speaking in this way without adapting you may have beautiful sentences coming out of your mouth that are correct 100 but this is beautiful gibberish 80 percent of your audience doesn't understand you sir and if you're speaking to an international group i think you want them to understand you and if only 20 of the people understand you that's on you sorry it's on you in my job i i'm in multinational companies and observe a lot of real-life meetings i do a lot of observation of people and that's happens very very often okay um at the end of the day what do you want do you want communication or do you want perfect english that no one understands okay absolutely in in the pdf that christian sent me which is your pamphlet which is that just you know which describes uh this whole project and i guess people can download it we'll find out about that in a minute on page 50 um there's a well there's a quote the quote says needless complexity leads to negative evaluations and apparently in a 2005 uh study in princeton the researcher wanted to know if using complex language helps you to communicate better and he performed five different experiments including replacing all of the nouns verbs and adjectives in a text with its longest entry in the thesaurus and he discovered that when you use complex language people rate you lower in intelligence likability and trustworthiness so people think that you are less intelligent less likable and less trustworthy and he summarized needless complexity leads to negative evaluations and the reason is simple if people can't understand you they can't understand your message so instead of being a tool to communicate language becomes a barrier to communication um so matt have you had any kind of pushback or criticism about uh about this work then a little i think some people let's be honest some people will just never adapt because they don't feel that they need to they come from the point of view that we're speaking in english this is my my language in quotations and everyone should learn it they think it's not that difficult you should just learn it and i'm not going to adapt so i think there's some specific people that we may never be able to uh convince of this but maybe they like to discriminate maybe they are some people just don't like foreigners there could be many other reasons underneath that language is often used as a form of discrimination so yes and i think that there's some people who are in that category um otherwise yeah i think that pushback i think most of it comes from that direction i think another thing that happens while doing these workshops that i've seen is that people say they listen to this they see this they do some exercises they say yeah it's good it's right i need to be more aware of that but i'm good i don't do it anyways you know i'm already pretty good at this the reality isn't is there isn't because if we actually observe them in a meeting and sometimes in such workshops you could have observation in their company where the trainer listens to their meeting and then they give them feedback and you actually throw their own words back at them they're really shocked so they think that they're not doing those things but actually they are they so that's another thing that happens quite often i did i did actually receive a comment on youtube um in response to my most recent conversation with christian in which we did mention this project near the end he talked about how native speakers often are completely unaware of how bad they are at communicating with non-natives in english and um the comment is from dawn peacock dawn is an english teacher on youtube and she really enjoyed the conversation she doesn't fit into that category of people who just take against the idea of the project maybe for other reasons dawn is you know she's got a different um uh comment here so what she said was this she said i watched this about a week ago and i'm still wondering about one thing when you talk about training native english speakers to communicate with non-native speakers i wonder in what contexts we would be advised to speak with fewer idioms take time to enunciate more carefully than we would naturally and so on she says it's a little unclear to me at what point the communication is considered global even giving a conference here in the u.s so dawn is from the states even giving a conference here in the us in a big city a third or more of the audience might be composed of non-native speakers of english and so blah blah blah blah blah should the question is in what situations should native english speakers simplify their language to be more comprehensive or more comprehensible to non-native speakers um so yeah i guess the the point she's making there is that um when do you define a situation as global when is it necessary to start adapting because there is a gray area sometimes you get groups which are a mix of natives and non-natives and stuff like that so what about that and she also did mention doesn't it feel like as well there's a danger that if we constantly adapt the more the global every situation becomes the more we adapt the more we sort of lose in terms of um subtleties and and shades of meaning and and the beauty of certain idioms so the first question is when when should native speakers adapt how do we know when we're in a global situation and secondly is this likely to have any kind of effect is it going to dumb down the language in general mm-hmm let's see when is the situation global i think the first question is it's not in it's not a clear thing all the time it's just simply not easy to always know that but i think we need to think of our audience like we we normally would we have to look at our audience and think who are we communicating to who's the target of this message um that's that's where i would start from then there are going to be some situations where your target may be both okay and then i would probably suggest to go somewhere in the middle um it's very different if i'm giving a ted talk than if i'm speaking inside of a team's meeting in my company and i think honestly most of the people in the world are not giving ted talks so i don't think that situation comes up so often but if it does we need to think of our audience and find some balance there in the middle and the way we might be able to accommodate that is just say you know um we have this expression i have i use this i like this expression it means this you just have a little maybe comment there that doesn't disturb the native speakers too much okay but it helps maybe use a lot of signposting which we should use anyways in our first language so yeah if i have a good structure and a good story that's that's clear i mean that's going to help as well so yeah often the things that will be things that are what makes better communication for non-natives will often make better community communication for natives too because you know keep it simple is always a good uh thing to remember and like you know um yeah just basically keep it simple don't over complicate your message um okay what about the other thing which is about dumbing down if you want the english i'm sure she doesn't mean that in a negative way but i understand what she she means there about losing the subtle beautiful pieces of an idiom or an expression that you can't communicate in another way okay is the english language in general i think we don't have any control of that anyways let's remember that how many english speakers native english speakers are there in the world compared to non-native english speakers so what 400 500 million whatever it is native speakers there are in the world and maybe between 1 billion and 2 billion second language english speakers the the language is already in the global hands okay so i think that we don't need to worry about that i think that you have different types of englishes you use with different people when you speak to your friends in a pub you don't say um the english language is going to be destroyed because i'm speaking this way in this one moment okay you're still able to adapt your language into a very beautiful flowery flowerly way in another situation so i don't think that it's somehow dumbing it down that we're adapting within that moment i think it always depends on your audience and the language will take care of itself and if we lose some beautiful idiom we'll lose it that happens anyways honestly yeah but you lose language all the time things are constantly shifting expressions are you know stop being used new things come in other things go away yeah it's constantly changing anyway yeah you really feel like you need to use that beautiful idiom because you can't explain it in another way that's fine cool use it but just be sure you check with your audience maybe that they understand what it means again i can create a beautiful sentence that no one understands that's not very helpful for communication what's your goal if you're writing poetry is one goal but if i'm trying to communicate that's a different goal so yeah yeah it comes down to the old things of form and function things ultimately have to be functional first um i guess yes so um where can people find out more about this we mentioned the pamphlet the pdf that christian sent me yeah can people find out these things and so on i think that um probably you'll you'll link that maybe in in the show notes here or what if anyone wants that it's just actually it's a simple pdf created by christian and myself it's quite simple you could flip through it really easily and it has um 21 tips basically for native english speakers to adapt i would say if you're working with native speakers that are difficult to understand a question is how would you get this into their hands that's a difficult question to answer but um this is something you could pass around maybe you could pass it around to others if you're just learning english you could still take it maybe look at it and you could look at this in the opposite way look these are 21 obstacles the native speakers are presenting to me yeah um yeah and maybe you could think okay i should try to work on these things it's about meeting in the middle always so yeah i think it could be used in different ways yeah fascinating stuff really good good luck with the project and uh really good to talk to you about all of this and uh well where can do you have a website or somewhere that people can go to find out about your work that you do online at all sure i have my own little website but it's not so important it's coyote english okay but um that just has some vocabulary things i do some speaking challenges but it's all about speaking and communicating but um you know what i think if someone is interested in in exercising their english or wants to get to know me or maybe even work or have lessons with christian and so on would be um this charity project that we've worked on together his project that i joined also because these workshops that we're doing for native speakers our plan is that the the profit from that if it's for a company that goes back to this charity project which is a really cool project about building schools in in some countries that need them okay um so that would be somewhere too to go to do you still need uh assistance support you know what they did we did with that of course christian did most of this but he collected a community of people that are exercising their english okay so they're exercising every day in a telegram group they have different lessons with different teachers that are volunteering their time for it and um he collected or we collected 50 000 a lot of money guys to build a school in laos and now we're starting up on the on the second one um but more importantly i mean most importantly is those kids getting at school but also this was a great fun place to exercise your english in your english you need everything right you need a mixed diet you need to listen to luke's podcast you need to watch some youtube videos you need to read something you need to do a little bit of everything and this is one way to exercise your speaking i'd say where do people go then to to take part in in that group i think they should go to christian's website because it's through his project so at kanguroenglish.com i'm guessing okay yeah that's right yeah okay yeah well great thank you for talking to us about this matt it's been really interesting can i say a final thing for all those learners out there when you don't understand when you're frustrated when you don't understand that american colleague who comes in just remember that it may not only be you okay it may not be you okay you have done a lot of work you are doing a lot of work and you're always improving your english okay it may be that the person in front of you isn't adapting that well and that's nice they need to adapt we need to understand them in the moment i know that's frustrating that's difficult i know but just from a motivation point of view remember that motivation is everything so it's your key to learning language is loose it's often yeah yeah absolutely okay all right great well um good i'll let you go then now have a lovely day and um thanks again for talking to us yeah thanks for inviting me yeah

Channel: Luke's English Podcast

Views: 19,474

Rating: 4.9505301 out of 5

Keywords: learn, learning, english, lesson, lessons, luke, podcast, luke's, vocabulary, native, speaker, interviews, listening, pronunciation, british, accent, london

Id: 9VUkoHCKboc

Length: 59min 19sec (3559 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021