Don’t worry, everyone speaks English
One of the biggest challenges of moving to a non-English speaking country is the necessity to learn a foreign language. For some it is the prime reason not to move, the challenge can seem insurmountable. This is especially so for the British. The British are remarkable in Europe for their inability to learn another language. A recent study has shown that there has been a dramatic decline in language learning and ability since the decision to remove compulsory language study from the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) programme in 2004. Fewer than half of UK school pupils choose to take a language, compared with 76% of pupils taking languages in 2002. This drop off in language learning should come as no surprise. Even though I graduated secondary school before the law changed and was therefore required to take at least one language during my GCSEs, it was never explained to us why learning a language was useful. It was simply another subject hurdle to jump. Considering that throughout school, I was constantly told how critical it was to have maths skills (“You won’t get anywhere without maths”), it’s odd that no one pointed out the myriad benefits of learning a language.
Tied into this decline in language skills is the often heard phrase “Well, everyone speaks English anyway”. I heard it at school, I heard it when I told people I planned to move to Germany and I still hear it today from British people who actually live here in Germany. It’s like the sacred mantra of the British, repeated so much, that it’s somehow become gospel truth. I’ve heard and been part of discussions where British people actually discourage others from learning a language, as if someone else’s attempts to better themselves is somehow a threat. “Why bother” they whine “The Germans speak better English than we do!”.
The question is, do the Germans speak English better than native-speakers? I have some experience with this topic, given that I started my career teaching Business English. Although much of what I do today focuses on training communication, intercultural and organisational topics, not so long ago I was making lesson plans and creating activities, all with the aim of teaching various businesses English. What I learned from those years is this: yes, the German education system prepares many young people with a technical knowledge of the English language. More than once I found myself being challenged over the minutia of the present perfect or faced demands from a room full of people to go into detail on conditional sentences. English grammar rules are drilled into German school pupils, to the point that it appears to be the only focus of lessons. What the German education system fails to prepare young people for is the reality that the English learned in school is light-years away from the English spoken by the native speaker.
Native English (like German) is a mine field of colloquialisms, idioms and weird phrasing, not to mention the complications of pronunciation and accents. My wife’s experience is similar to many of her compatriots. She arrived in England in the halcyon days of 2007, with top marks in English and ready to start her ERASMUS year abroad. She landed at Newcastle airport confident of her skills and ready to take on the challenge. That confidence was severely rocked as soon as she spoke to one of my Geordie brethren. She couldn’t understand anything anyone was saying, the English they were speaking was unlike any she had learned at school or in the first years of her English degree in Germany. She was overjoyed to find that Geordies were incredibly welcoming and helpful, but she had real problems understanding what people were saying. They spoke quickly, they kept saying “pet” even though there were no obvious animals in sight and every sentence seemed to end in the word “Like”.
Before you get the wrong idea, I’m not against the nuances of German, British English or American English for that matter. They are important cultural features of these languages that have developed over centuries. They are fun and curious and tell us a lot about how the world used to be. I love my dialect and work very hard to retain my accent (when I’m not teaching) as it is something I hope to pass on to my children as part of their mixed heritage. My wife also gets a kick out of the fact that she is regularly assumed to be a native Geordie. Although it was difficult at first, my wife has acclimatised over the many years we’ve been together. Her Geordie pronunciation of “water” is truly a thing of beauty.
Dialect and colloquialisms are one thing, but it’s not just these points that cause English learners to question their language skills. Sit through any meeting that involves a native speaker and you see the wealth of ridiculous language that has been created to assuage the egos of native-English speaking middle managers. Buzzwords are the bane of my existence. Several times a year I will have to address the wealth of incomprehensible gibberish that has been thought up by people who surely imagine themselves to be great communicators. Meetings filled with people deep diving, synergising or levelling up, while actively being agile, at the end of the day. The trick of a good buzzword is that it sounds like something people should know, while at the same time saying very little. So, when someone uses a buzzword, those who do not understand them are unlikely to say anything. They just nod, write them down and then after the meeting send me an email to find out what the hell they were just told. Worse still, because they sound like something important, German employees believe they must use them too. Which is why I often find myself unpicking phrases like eye to eye meeting (face to face meeting), a bastardisation of the term eye to eye (to agree).
Despite attempts to roll back reality, we truly live in a global society and unless something truly catastrophic occurs, this is unlikely to change. English is now spoken by more non-native speakers than by native-speakers, and the latter sourly need to remember that. We are rightly protective of the English language, just as the Germans are rightly protective of their own language, but if both sides could learn one simple lesson, it is this: think about your audience. If you know you’re speaking to a non-native speaker of your language, do them a favour, think about how you phrase things. One good sentence spoken by a non-native is not an invitation to suddenly speak a mile-a-minute, it’s a chance to communicate.
