January 10, 2024
Everyone else doesn’t have better English and a wider vocabulary than you, it just feels like it.
Yes, you’re right… I don’t know you, and I haven’t heard you speak. But I have spent over 25 years teaching English to people like you… so hear me out.
When we listen to other people speak a language we’re not native speakers of, provided they aren’t complete beginners, we’re usually impressed. They typically sound confident and as we’re listening to them we’re thinking, ‘Ooh, that’s a cool word, I didn’t know how to say that’.
Let’s get some perspective here. When we listen to these people, most of the time we’re completely unaware of all that’s going on inside of them. We just see what comes out of their mouths.
We don’t see all the internal anguish and second guessing that’s going on inside of them. Of course some people are natural communicators and just speak, but the vast majority of us, have an internal dialogue going on that’s worrying about grammar mistakes, vocabulary, intonation, formality, comprehension, etc… particularly when we’re speaking in front of our peers at work.
Another interesting thing is that what we tend to focus on all the words they use that we don’t know. We’re impressed by their vocabulary because we presume that they know all our words, plus all these new words.
But here’s the truth, we all have a similar ‘base vocabulary’ of words like table, chair, dog etc. Added to this we have a collection of cognates, words that are similar to our own language such as ‘ladder’ and ‘Leiter’ if you’re German, or ‘competition’ and ‘competición’ if you’re Spanish.
Finally, we have a selection of specialist words that we’ve acquired through our own unique circumstances, for example in German I know that ‘shock absorber’ is ‘Stoßdämpfer’. The reason I know this word is because my engineer and car/bike enthusiast boyfriend who speaks a little less German than me regularly persuades me to phone garages to enquire about spare parts and truth be told, I like the sound of the word!
Another thing we notice and tend to be sensitive about is accent. Very few people like the sound of their own voice. So hearing ourselves speak a foreign language through the veil of our insecurities isn’t going to fill us with love of how we sound. Again the truth is that other people like our voices a lot more than we do.
Let’s face it, judgement over what is or isn’t a nice accent is very personal. There are some accents I could listen to for hours, others I struggle to listen to for seconds, and I’m talking about native speakers here! So, who can honestly say what a ‘good’ accent is? The UK has a huge range of accents, particularly for it’s size, so when you say you want to sound like a native speaker, there isn’t single accent you’re trying to achieve.
A final point about accents here. Your accent makes you unique, it makes you interesting, it makes you stand out. That’s why you don’t like it, because you don’t like the attention. But the truth is that you can use that to your advantage when communicating. Because you’re more memorable; people need to pay that little more attention to you to understand what you’re saying. So please, don’t waste this opportunity, don’t use it as an excuse, use your uniqueness as an advantage to be heard and get that recognition you both desire and deserve.
A final truth for you, that I’ve noticed over the years both while communicating with and teaching English is that the people who have some of the biggest challenges with communication in a foreign language are introverts. Not because they have worse grammar or a smaller vocabulary, truth be known they probably have better grammar and a wider vocabulary.
They face the biggest challenges because they tend to be perfectionists and worry more about their mistakes… but that’s a topic for a whole new article!
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