- How do native speakers truly feel when talking
with non native speakers?
Hello, ladies and gentleman, boys and girls,
I'm Julian Northbrook from DoingEnglish.com
here with another quick two minute
english learning tip for you.
Are you ready? Hit it.
Somebody asked on a question and answer site, Quora,
how do native speakers truly feel when talking with
non native speakers?
This was an interesting question.
But more interesting were the responses.
You see, there were hundreds and hundreds of them.
Interested in what these people had to say
and what their attitude towards this particular question
might be I did my typical thing of going
totally over the top with it and
becoming a little bit obsessed.
I went through every response, downloading them all,
and loading them into my qualitive data analysis software.
I then spent an entire day doing
some pretty thorough analysis of these responses.
And what came out of it was quite interesting.
In fact, I do need to write this up.
Because it would make quite a good research paper
and I still haven't got around to it, I digress.
The vast majority of responses were quite positive.
People said that they actually really enjoy
talking to people from other countries and other cultures.
Because it allows them to talk about and experience
via those people and their stories.
A whole different way of life.
They are fascinated about their home countries,
their cultures, and the different ways
of looking at things that those people have.
However, at the same time, many of those same people
also said that it was important to them
that you were able to have a decent conversation with them.
It's not that they were bothered about your mistakes
or grammar or using the wrong words or anything like that.
Or even really the speed at which you speak,
your fluency, or really any of the things
that non native speakers tend to worry about.
Rather, what most people were concerned with
was the depth and the quality of the conversation.
They didn't like being stuck in conversations
that were too shallow, too surface level.
They wanted to really get deep into the topics
and to be able to go further than just surface level stuff.
But that's not all because there was another
very interesting finding that came out of this analysis.
Although I've already said that
these native speakers weren't really bothered
about your mistakes, using the wrong word,
or the wrong grammar, or something like that.
It was the depth of conversation most important to them.
There was a slight caveat here.
You see, although they're not bothered about your mistakes
it was very important for them to be able to
understand you easily.
First and foremost, people said they felt
tired when they had to work hard
to try to understand what you are saying.
And that ruined the enjoyment of the conversation.
But also, many people said that they felt
too embarrassed to ask you to repeat things
and they felt stupid themselves when they
couldn't understand you.
Now many people worry about making mistakes
because they think if they use the wrong word
people would look at them as if they are stupid.
But actually it was the other way around.
The native speakers themselves felt inadequate
like they were unable to understand you
and unable to aid you in the conversation.
So what really comes out of this is that
native speakers don't care about your mistakes
and things as much as you think they do.
However, in order for a conversation to be a good one,
it is important to them that you are able to do it
at a high level, to be able to go deep into a topic,
and to able to explain your points clearly
and in a way people can easily understand.
Or to put it another way, they don't want to have
to work hard to have the conversation with you.
Because that just ruins the enjoyment
and makes them feel inadequate.
If you wanna polish up your English so you can
get to the level where you can easily do that
and have those deep, enjoyable,
easy to understand conversations with people
head over to DoingEnglish.com/FreeTraining
and check out my free training where I teach you the five
key changes you need to make to your
English learning routine in order to
transform your English speaking in record time.
Alternatively, if you're ready to take it to the next level
right here right now head over to
DoingEnglish.com/Talk to book your free
one-on-one consultation with me.
To see how and indeed, if, I can help you
to make that English transformation.
This is me, Julian Northbrook,
signing out from another video.
If you found this useful give it a nice big old thumbs up.
If you didn't give it a thumbs up anyway
and I'll see you, my friend, in the next video.
Bye bye.
(rock music)