"Dear Paul,

It's not what you are, it's what you did. At least, I hope.

I suspect this is all coming out of a desire to emphasize that communication is important when you're starting a company. It's never just about solving technical problems. Well, sure, that's true. But as Nitasha has covered rather thoroughly, your "empirical evidence" isn't some blind sample - it's a walking demonstration of confirmation bias.

The larger problem is something you've explained yourself, in your essay on "Investor Herd Dynamics". Another name for this essay might have been, "Venture Capital is a Cargo Cult". In that essay, you lay out several reasons why an investment becomes more attractive when other people are already investing in it. And here's the crux of your argument:

'But frankly the most important reason investors like you more when you've started to raise money is that they're bad at judging startups. Judging startups is hard even for the best investors. The mediocre ones might as well be flipping coins. So when mediocre investors see that lots of other people want to invest in you, they assume there must be a reason.'

Do I need to spell this out? Your bias is a cancer on your industry, because it becomes part of the voodoo nonsense that less astute investors use to pick their horses. Your decisions may seem rational to you — but if you talk about how you don't like to back people with strong accents, it becomes less likely that other people will back them as well. You can be better than this.

Look deeper."

As a founder you need to interact with customers, vendors, employees and investors. If those groups have trouble understanding your speech, then how could you not have a problem?

Really, this is not a debatable point among sensible people. The only part that is debatable is which accents are strong enough to pose a major problem.

Unfortunately most people don't seem to logically process what was said before deciding to argue. They just pattern match. If the pattern looks like something they argue with, then they argue. So people pattern match on his argument, see the word "accent", and argue on the basis of his comment being thinly veiled xenophobia. Which could not be farther from the truth!

As european (and italian), I can confirm most of what Antirez said.

Moreover, founding a startup (or running a business, or working as an account, or working as a diplomat) is undoubtly much more difficult when you have to work with people speaking a foreing language.

The truth is that not just "accents", but also slang, technical lingo and even local humour come into play when you have to decode whether the person you are speaking with is really angry, sarcastic or she is just joking.

Things get even worse when you can't see those you are speaking with.

I don't think PG claims that strong accents are a barrier to creating successful startups in Silicon Valley, they just add up yet another hurdle that founders (and employees alike) must overcome to make that startup successful.

Therefore, such hurdles, must be accounted for.

One of my favourite bits of (UK) english that I regularly find myself having to explain to people is the difference between "bollocks", meaning that something awful has occurred and "the bollocks", meaning that something is amazing.

From my limited point of view, I have noticed that some speakers with strong accents seem to be oblivious to the fact that they are hard to understand. They speak grammatically correct sentences and they sit on that knowledge seemingly thinking it's enough, that it's me who's stupid for not understanding what they said. The problem in those cases is that through their confidence, they try to speak too fast for their ability to clearly pronounce words and their syllables, which results in a long stream of garble to my ear.

English is my second language, French being my native tongue, and I do have an accent myself, but I try to speak individual words and syllables clearly. I still have an accent, maybe 'strong' but I'm pretty sure everybody can understand clearly the words I speak, or at least most of the time.

My wife is also learning English as a second language, Vietnamese being her mother tongue. Recently she's been improving a lot in her classes and begun to be overconfident in her ability to speak, trying to use contractions everywhere. Consequently, she's been having a harder time to communicate with others. My recommendation to her was to slow down and pay attention to say every word clearly before jumping into more artistic manipulations of the language. Surely it was frustrating to her, feeling she was moving back to a more primitive use of english. But she's also been improving her ability to be understood by other speakers.

In Silicon Valley there are so many people from all over the USA, and from other countries, that this type of bigotry is less important. I can't promise it will entirely not be an issue, but I doubt it would be a big deal.

In fairness, speaking as someone from Georgia, you run into a lot of this within the south. I've lived here my entire life, and generally speak with a fairly neutral, midwestern accent, and I'd say that it's extremely common within the roughly 35 and under demographic around here.

Not commenting on whether it's fair or not, but because there is such a stigma around southern accent = stupid, many southerners, especially younger ones, make a concerted effort not to pick up the accent. Generally, the younger and better educated a southerner is, the less likely they are to sound like a southerner. That's not because the accent makes someone stupid, but because there is an awareness that it has that perception, so people avoid it.

And, I mean, I'll still fall into it in less formal settings or when I'm cranking up the charm, but in a business environment it gets switched off.

If you work at a large Silicon Valley company, there's always that one meeting where someone at the table, while obviously smart, speaks such an incomprehensible version of English, that whenever suggestions from their end are vocalized, everyone looks at one another with silent "did you get that?", nods politely and then moves on.

As for people who are standing behind PG’s statement, just look outside your window. The US has had a number of immigrants who came to this country and did not speak a single word of English. Yes, they did not speak English forget about a strong accent – who built successful businesses. I think that is great. Somehow lack of the right accent didn't prevent them from interacting with customers/vendors etc. Also, most businesses are international and you can’t expect to master the local accent and idioms everywhere. Does Tim Cook have Chinese accent, or German accent? Last I checked the iPhone is selling quite well in China and Germany. The idea that you need the right accent and master the local idioms to do business makes no sense today where your major customers are half a world away. You partner and figure things out. Having the right accent is not the top or even important in that list. PG is a great guy but he slipped big time this one time.

He is looking at it from his point of view of what running a startup and startup culture encompasses, that is: an environment rife with competition built on extreme uncertainty that can be transcended with the appropriate communicative abilities to fool investors, founders, employees to believe in what you're doing. In that context, it would seem that having an accent that hinders others' ability to understand you is a huge disadvantage.

I do not know about the beginnings of Intel, but Apple in the startup stage had a founding team whose native tongue was English. Steve Jobs was fluent in English and could deliver these great orations about his stupidly crazy ideas to his friends and investors who also spoke English. You can't say that didn't help him. Having a thick accent that prevented him from communicating clearly would've had a multiplicative effect on the unwillingness of others to even listen to his ideas.

PG never just stopped at "people with accents can't succeed or be successful in business." And it's incredibly disingenuous of you and others to continue to label him as anti-accent when he has repeatedly stated the context and details of his position.

Sorry, but even the weak interpretation of his statement actually raises more questions. For starters, how did YC end up funding them in the first place if they had such a strong accents that hinders understanding? Given YC accepts 1 in 25 (or 50) of applicants in a short time frame (going by a short video) what exactly did YC see in the founders. Or did the founders suddenly develop unacceptable accents in the three months at YC. Also, what did the YC team do when they found out about these guys’ accent problem? Did they ask them to partner with someone else? Did the founders refuse to partner etc. If so, is that an accent problem or a pig-headedness issue?

In fact, when it comes to startups, that is exactly what he is saying, and your dismissal of it by saying that it's not a surprising top red flag tells me that you are consciously trying to make this more racy than it actually is.

If you read his real initial position in the New York Times [0], you'll find: "“You can sound like you’re from Russia,” he said, in the voice of an evil Soviet henchman. “It’s just fine, as long as everyone can understand you.”" Again, the issue is communicating to reach an understanding. If you cannot convey thoughts, ideas, facts relevant to the core of your startup/idea, then you are at a disadvantage. Plain and simple.

I come from a community of Egyptians with incredibly thick, hard-to-understand accents, my father being one of them. I have difficulty talking about very complicated subjects with him because neither of us can clearly articulate our thoughts in the other's language, and so we never fully get a grasp on each other's opinions or the positions we hold. We both know the other isn't stupid; there's just a language barrier that's preventing effective dialogue.

Now take an investor who is deciding whether to risk his/her money on a startup. If an investor cannot come to a clear understanding of what it is you do or effectively bounce thoughts back-and-forth to assess you and your company, then they are not able to minimize their risk as much as they can, in an already incredibly risky endeavor. I'll also say again that had PG discovered that there was a correlation between risk of failure and stammering CEOs, he would've mentioned it.

Anyway, I'd like to think that instead of sparking an entire racist investing trend, that PG's advice has motivated a considerable number of foreign entrepreneurs to improve their English-speaking capabilities -- a skill that will certainly help them in every part of their lives (if they hope to plan to move to America to pursue a startup).

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/y-combinator-sili...

Long-distance communication and migration is becoming more common: native English speakers (especially in North America) are getting more chances to hear and become familiar with the speech of people who do not have English as their first language. (Without familiarity, it's easy to assume that flawed grammar and pronunciation means either flawed thinking or risky cultural differences.) So I'd surmise that the heavily-accented currently have their best opportunities ever to thrive in North American capital/recruiting/selling markets – and earlier generations of investors would have offered even harsher assessments about the impact of strong accents.

One of the points I was making with the My Fair Lady-themed joke in another thread (the SayAfter.me accent training offer) was that this is an eternal issue.

Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters; condemned by every syllable she utters…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg

That film came out in 1964 (winning Best Picture), based on a 1956 stage musical, based on a 1913 play (Pygmalion). The same ideas about accent and career-success go back further, and easily translate to many other languages and cultures.

Of course, an uneducated native (or disadvantaged local group dialect) accent is a different thing than a non-native accent. A non-native accent is more likely to indicate someone with the education and drive to dare operating in a non-native language environment. But, it takes a bit of familiarity to internalize that understanding, and stronger accents still signal a risk of slower and more error-prone communication.

When someone honestly points out that the strongest accents have been problematic, based on significant observational experience, they haven't "slipped", they've done the listeners a favor by sharing a perceived truth. Even if for some reason their observation is in error (and here I doubt it), by sharing the lesson they're helping, not hurting, the process of describing and understanding the world.

This is a self fulfilling prophesy. Like a 'black swan'. If PG meant to criticise (or point out) that poor communication skills are unproductive, his comment would be banal. He chose this as a cute, cock-tail party line. It was just a poor decision on his part. Its not too dis-similar to another famous SV/C who admitted 'he knows no black people'. OK, great. No we have two prominent people in the Valley who use the rule of thumb: no blacks, no funny-sounding people. Quite embarrassing, really.[0,1]

__________________

[0] 'I don't know a single black entrepreneur' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS93R1YnK-U

[1] http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/nationalorigin.cfm

National Origin Discrimination & Work Situations

The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.

National origin discrimination involves treating people (applicants or employees) unfavorably because they are from a particular country or part of the world, because of ethnicity or accent

___________________

Note that investing is not hiring; there is no employer-employee legal relationship. BUT, <Entreprenuers> need to be careful as they do in fact hire employees. So this is pretty ??? advice to entrepreneurs unless it comes pro-bono legal advice.

In any case, we are talking about Silicon Valley here. Not society in general. What made it special is this ability to assimilate talent from all over the world. As has been pointed out by others, people with strong accents are all over the valley running businesses successfully. BTW, significant observational experience from pg is about 100 companies in an economy that has several million businesses. So, yeah not exactly significant if you ask me.

Until then, on the empirical issue – what has actually been a predictive indicator during the YC programs – real experience, not theory and hope, matters.

If pg's ancestors emigrated from England, that is not in fact a judgement on it. The UK has exported a great many people to every corner of the globe, and received them in kind, because it is a very globally engaged collection of islands. By your twisted logic this must make it just about the worst country in the world.

I'm from Quebec, we speak French there. When you come to do business here, you'll talk to investors and politicians in English and you'll be just fine. People know that foreigners coming to invest/expand their business speak English. If you speak French too, great! Then when you start selling your product, that product will have to be translated. But you as a business woman/man coming to Quebec and dealing with people, you'll be just fine speaking English.

Now if I go in the Bay Area and start expecting people to do business in French with me, I doubt anybody will bother listening to me.

It's right up there with the allegation that "the French don't even have a word for entrepreneurship".

(Of course, only the 1st phrase is true, but they're both funny.)

The founders of both firms speak American english well and raised bunches of money in America, so language and accents were not a concern for them with regards to fundraising. Indeed, America is the best market in the world for raising speculative venture capital, so being comfortable with American English is a useful skill to have for entrepreneurs.

Those are real communication problems recognized by professionals for decades if not centuries, and happens all over the world.

However accents are strictly a cultural and socioeconomical difference: someone coming from a very remote country is of course going to have a considerably different accent, and in countries like england the difference between classes has created some very different accents all over the country.

In the old days in england having a posh accent was a good way of working your way up the social ladder because being the best steam-engine engineer mattered little if you sounded like an illiterate irish. Same in the usa where even president Clinton got some bs from east coast journalists for his southern accent.

Did I say at any point that bad accents mean you are dumb and unintelligible? no, because that's not true. What it does is make you a target of xenophobia because it makes it very clear that you are "not from around here"

When that happens it doesn't matters if you are as eloquent as the best orators in history because if your public already has a demeaning attitude towards you they are not going to care one bit about what you have to say, after all you are just one dumb foreigner! hearing you is a waste of everybody's time!

pg could have gone for speech impediments instead which are a problem no matter where or what language you speak, and of course if english is your second language those problems are just going to compound. But pg went for the accents and the accents alone, as if the number of white american dudebro founders out there saying your instead of you're all the time were perfect.

Then again maybe when they are speaking pg is actually paying attention to what they say.

Not to worry! If you are as eloquent as the best orators in history, you'll do great in Silicon Valley!

If you're starting a company, your communication skills are possibly equally as important as your technical skills -- there are simply so many difficult tasks that you will need really great communication to accomplish.

Not just convincing investors, but also your customers, possible suppliers and/or potential partners, your employees and potential hires... Communication is huge.

If your targets here are NOT English-speaking, then your communication in English is not what matters -- you had damn well better be very fluent in the languages those people speak. This also applies to a native English-speaker trying to break into foreign markets.

Unfortunately, there are all kinds of nasty psychological tricks that can harm you if you even look foreign (I'm thinking of a study where students were given one of two photos of an instructor but the same audio file, and some of the ones shown a Chinese-looking instructor had trouble with her accent, but the ones shown a blond instructor didn't.

Then if you do have a strongly non-local accent... people who grew up in fairly urban areas may have no trouble understanding you, but others may be lost with an accent that's even moderately different from their own. I remember spending a hour on the phone debugging with an IBM DB2 tech based in India, and his accent didn't seem terribly strong to me, but the (upstate-NY born & bred) woman sitting next to me was extremely quiet on the call... I found out afterwards that she'd hardly understood a word he'd said.

It's totally legit to talk about the bias (and I tend to agree pg should make some effort not to make the irrational part worse...), but it's also valid to tell founders that working on their accent can make a huge difference in their success.

He's only saying that speaking English at a high level of fluency is a requirement for his investments in an English-speaking program that he runs. Fluency means you understand others and others understand you. How many of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have thick foreign accents?

It depends what country you're in.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/1515825.stm)

> A head chef who was sacked for speaking Welsh at work has been awarded more than £10,000 in compensation.

> The award for racial discrimination and unfair dismissal comes five years after Gwilym Williams was sacked from a hotel near Caernarfon after refusing to speak English to Welsh-speaking colleagues.

His bosses didn't speak Welsh.

If he was Russian or Chinese and nobody could understand him in either English or Welsh, I don't think it would legally be discrimination to fire him (nor morally).

The story that's been told is that his English speaking bosses wanted him to speak English in the kitchen. He refused, speaking Welsh to the Welsh speakers and English to the English speakers.

They sacked him, claiming it had nothing to do with the language.

A tribunal found that it was about his use of language.

> If he was Russian or Chinese and nobody could understand him in either English or Welsh, I don't think it would legally be discrimination to fire him (nor morally).

I'd be interested to know what would have happened if it had been a language other than Welsh.

If there were a bunch of people who spoke Russian fluently, and he spoke Russian to them and English to the English speakers.

So in multilingual jurisdictions there can be strong employment protections around speaking one's choice of national language. In this case the article says there was the Welsh Language Act of 1993, which presumably says that citizens of Wales are free to conduct all of their business in English or Welsh and shall not be discriminated against in any professional or government capacity for speaking either language as they please.

It's about workplace expectations that derive from the local culture. The hypothetical comparison that comes to mind would be if California adopted Spanish as a second language or something.

The warm and fuzzy thought police department (WTFPD) would like to have a little chat with you. You see, we have taken down bigger game than you, and we could easily have you stuffed and mounted on our mantle.

Instead of saying what you believe to be true, the WTFPD recommends that you say what we wish were true. Here at the WTFPD, our belief is that wishing hard enough for something will make it true.

Sure, some founders might be hurt along the way while your advice is temporarily false during the small period when we are waiting for our wishes to have effect. But it is far better for a foreign founder's company to die than suffer the chance that he might be made uncomfortable by the suggestion that adapting his accent to the norms of the local market might help his startup.

You see, the worst crime in the world according to the WTFPD is making people feel uncomfortable. That's why we're warm and fuzzy ;)

Do I need to spell this out to you? Shape up Paul. Our sanctimony is powerful enough to destroy any reputation. Struggle too hard and we can make you a "racist". News reports about you will forever read "Paul Graham, the investor who stirred controversy by saying that foreign accents are bad for startups, ate breakfast today". Don't make us do it Paul.

The next time you are tempted to open your mouth to speak your mind based on your experience investing in over 500 startups, stop and consider that maybe we know better. You may have built a firm that revolutionized how investing is done, but we feel deeply. So who is really the expert here?

The world needs more sensitivity Paul, not the cancer of your nasty hatey hate speech. But we will give you a chance to redeem yourself. Beg for our forgiveness, say what you're supposed to say from now on, and join us in making the world a warmer, fuzzier place.

giggle and hugs

-The Warm and Fuzzy Thought Police Department

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Once name-calling starts, we are playing the grade school game of seeing who can invent the worst insult. No thanks.

It's a brand new account that's posting deeply hypocritical crap, and the only "real" identity tied to it is a new and spammy twitter account.

Let's not pretend he's here for a conversation when every single available signal indicates that he's full of shit.

So you repeatably referring to those you disagree with as the thought police is different in what ways?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/labels.html

And your handle is that of a roman politician an odd one to chose when your saying real world politics doesn't matter.

  hey guys, you are not understanding us, we are not
  understanding what you say as well, and it is hard to find
  people that, once your understanding limits are obvious,
  will try to slow down the peace of the conversation. Often
  even if I say I did not understood, I'll get the same
  sentence repeated the same at speed of light.

Making these changes to your speech in real time is a difficult skill that must be cultivated and practiced. I would encourage native speakers to work at this skill, as it can make a big difference. I was once speaking to a couple of Russians and an American from the same region of the US as me. The Russians said they could understand me easily, but had difficulty understanding the other American. The difference was that I was making an effort to speak more clearly for them.

The Spanish do that - and it doesn't help them much, either.

Oh, and you've forgotten the "waving your arms about" bit.

But I sometimes think it does a disservice to students or people that I spend a lot of time with (like my wife, who's not a native English speaker). Yes, they understand me. But am I then making it harder to understand "real" English speakers who aren't as careful with their pronunciation?

Here's a BBC Radio Four programme where Stephen Fry talks about spelling reform, and it includes a little bit about pronunciation. The brokenness of English is a problem we know about!

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039c5cs)

> The fact that people from different English speaking countries have issues communicating is already a big hint about how odd is English phonetically.

It doesn't have to be people from different countries! People in England can have very very different accents. It can be hard to understand some of the stronger accents.

Sometimes people keep a regional difference for some words but not others. I say "bath" with a short a, but "path" with a longer a.

> My advice is that if you are learning English now, start listening as soon as possible to spoken English.

BBC used to have the excellent World Service programming. It had a variety of interesting short documentary, long news reporting, and variety of British culture shows. Now it's just rolling news. Idiots who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing ignored the real "soft power" benefits of the old World Service programmes.

> I always advice people against translation efforts in the topic of technology, since I believe that it is much better to have a common language to document and comment the source code, and actually to obtain the skills needed to understand written technical documentation in English is a simple effort for most people.

I gently disagree with this part.

For creating code I strongly agree, you're right. We do need a common language.

But if I had the money I'd set up a foundation to improve the man pages and documentation for projects, and to then translate these documents into the big languages - Portuguese, Spanish, French, some form of Chinese. Etc. I feel that this is important for poor people in developing nations.

Finally, your written English is good. I knew you're not a native speaker, but I didn't have any trouble understanding what you were saying. Many people speak only one language.

BBC radio programmes were also at the receiving end of a wave of political correctness sweeping through the Blair years. "Classist" Received Pronunciation was out, regional accents were in (mostly so that Scottish cronies could occupy civil-servant jobs and the likes of John Prescott could eventually become plausible Peers of the Realm, but I digress). The result is such that, in 2013, I struggle to find any broadcast at all that might sound like old-fashioned RP. There is now no real alternative for learning RP: either you attend Oxbridge and/or belong to certain circles, or you'll be stuck with a local accent forever.

Paradoxically, trying to make RP disappear, they made it even more exclusive and desirable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation

It's interesting to see the effects of varied accents in modern British television programming on largely self-taught English speakers in relatively isolated communities though: Burmese Cockney has to be my favourite.

Fucking hell, you're a prize twat. Besides, the shift from RP to regional accents in the media started during the 60's, not the 90's, it isn't some Blairite conspiracy. My mum used to winge about it because her dad sent her to RP to get rid of her welsh accent just at the point where having a regional accent was starting to be a benefit.

I've been around here since 2001 and from what I've read, the blairites were the ones responsible for big changes at the BBC in particular. The topic had been raised and policies had been half-heartedly implemented before, but they were finally enshrined after Blair came to power.

Same goes for the Scottish influence in civil service and ministerial appointments, as far as I understand, although it could be argued that it's just balancing out the Tories' penchant for English-English personalities (probably because they hardly elected anyone out of Scotland since the Thatcher years).

(btw, sorry if this sounds anti-Labour; as a proto-Bennite, I probably resent the careerist attitude of most NewLabourites more than I should -- Benn fought hard to get rid of his titles, and now we're supposed to be led by Lord Prezza... -- and their horrible treatment of Gordon Brown is still too fresh).

Sorry for swearing at you before, but this seems unlikely.

About software documentation translation, maybe I'm biased since the Italian speaking population is so small that it's much simpler for italians to learn basic English skills, but actually Spanish or Chinese have so many speakers that the efforts could pay back a lot more.

As for the "World Service", I would already be happy enough with a "card game" program that actually focuses on pronounce, I can't find any, even if I suspect that a simple script using osx "say" program should suffice.

[1] http://www.duolingo.com/

If you can get it you might be better watching BBC World News than just listening to World Service on the radio so that you get the visual cues as well. My second language is French and it improved a lot through watching current affairs programmes each evening.

Should "can't" be kaːnt, kʰeɪnt or kænt ? Pederasts are pɛ.dəˌfaɪl or ˈpiː.dəˌfaɪl? Do we like to dɑːns or dæns ?

(examples taken from the last two TV shows I've seen _yesterday_)

Surely there are improvements we can all have to the way we misspeak (heck, I just learned "honorable" doesn't have a "h"!) but I have given up on getting english right until native speakers finally agree on whether it's tomaito or tomahto.

(Or, as wiktionary showss: təˈmɛɪtoː, təˈmætoː, təˈmɑːtəʊ, təˈmeɪtoʊ or təˈmeɪtə..)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dance#Pronunciation

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/can%27t#Pronunciation

Which way you should pronounce them depends, I suppose, on whether you speak to more British people or Americans.

I would love to have the same, but with the ability to play the sound of the word at the same time. Sounds like a simple program to write, probably it already exists.

It does and is called Anki. You'll probably need to search a bit though to find a deck that has italian/english with english sounds:

https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/english

Alternatively you could take decks made for other languages and build a new deck, since they're all stored in SQLite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashcard

Honestly I'd have to improve my spoken English a lot. It's not even comparable to my written skills. It feels like I have to learn the language all over again with my ears.

They'd include some of the programmes broadcast on BBC Radio Four, including panel games such as "Just a minute". They'd include some of the science and medical documentary that Radio 4 would broadcast. They'd also have their own programming - some soap operas, some news, some great documentaries.

All of this meant that English was being used in a variety of ways. There was informal, conversational English. There was English humour and word play. And there was more formal English.

But now the World Service has lost most of that. It is just a rolling news service now. There are some arts and science programmes, but those aren't great. The variety of spoken English is much reduced, and the variety of programming is much less. And everything is repeated every few hours, with some tweaks for different time zones.

Speaking English must be very hard!

(There was a time, as well, when the CBC and Radio Canada International used/enforced a standard pronunciation across the board. There was something quaint about it for every regional Canadian English dialect -- and our dialects, apart from Newfanese and the Nova Scotia Lunenburg dialect, tend to be pretty subtle -- but everyone could understand it. With the trend toward a vox populi approach, a rural Saskatchewan listener may find the various immigrant Englishes of major population centres like Toronto baffling at first. It's nice that communities can hear themselves on the radio -- it makes them feel more like first class citizens -- but it can impede communication between groups, and that friction can foster the very problems that the policies are trying to correct.)

I may be wrong, but it is still an enormous asset, worth saving and/or reviving one day.

The "problem" is to talk another language? Well, that's pretty imperialistic.

English has some good properties for a common language:

- It has a simple grammar

- It is spoken by the entertaining media

- It already has a head start

Now, if they could actually fix the major flaws:

- Spelling is absurd. It's not just bad, it is absurd.

- For foreigners, the UK accents are terrible. It took me a couple of days in London before I could understand people; and I came from a base of being perfectly fluent

Come to think of it. Scratch that fixing the UK accent part. It's a cool accent, double-oh seven style.

For the love of god, fix the spelling:

-----

"Eye Rhymes, by Helen Bowyer"

Bear and dear // Share, I fear // The pointless deceptivness // Of there and here.

Some and home // Tomb and comb, // Sin against the tongue // Like from and whom.

Howl and bowl // Foul and soul, // Mislead the ear // Like doll and toll. //

Give and dive // Live and thrive, // Bewilder the moppet // Of six or five.

Love and hove // Dove and strove // Sound no more alike // Than glove and cove.

Pew and sew // Do and go // Fail expectation // Like now and slow.

Laid and said // Must be read // As if they rhymed // With neighed and Ned.

------

As I said before, English spelling's bonkers.

http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html

Rough - 'ruff'

Cough - 'coff'

Bough - 'bow'

Though - 'tho'

Through - 'throo'

hiccough - 'hiccup'

Bought - 'bawt'

gh as in cough

o as in women

ti as in nation

Edit: I meant to point out that I have never seen 'awe, shucks' written before, always 'ah' or 'aww', but I can see how it might be written that way based on a Midwestern accent.

"burger" in much of the UK is completely rhotic, with both R's intensely rolled, while in other parts it is more like buhguh. Really sounds quite distinct to my ears.

The fact that the common language is actually English is not really relevant to me. I don't care if Spanish has more native speakers, or Chinese. The value of English is as a common language.

Pretty easy to call it an essential skill when English is your first language.

How about you try to pick up some new programming language using only Japanese documentation?

Funny story: Ruby took a while to catch on outside of Japan because its docs were all in 日本語. The Pickaxe was created by basically ignoring all the docs, reading the C, and playing around in the REPL.

Or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_l...

I think it would be really useful for some core information[1] to be made available in best quality form, and in many different languages. This would be things like "How does science work?" and other simple introductory science texts. This would be things like man pages.

This would help people learn the basic concepts while they're also learning other languages. Having short form, excellent quality, science and math educational material available in many languages could do a lot to make the world a better place.

Having read some of your other comments I see that you're aiming the "learn English, it's really useful" to people working at a much higher level than that. I gently agree with most of that - there are many areas where learning English is very useful.

Before ww2 in some technical fields you more or less had to learn German as that where a lot of the research was done - in chemistry it was effectively mandatory.

Before that a natural philosophers had to learn/know Latin.

As for anything to show that it is true… have you looked around you? English has very obviously become the lingua franca of commerce, science, and technology. This is not a controversial statement.

Yes it sucks a lot for some people, and no it isn't fair, but that doesn't change it.

What would you have us do?

It is very easy to say that common languages are good when you already speak that common language.

Common languages are great when you've reached the point of doing the job, but they cause extra burden on large parts of the world population and are a barrier to entry for poor people.

One response is to say "Let's teach a simple international English to as many people as possible". Another response is to say "Let's create excellent quality documentation, and then translate this into the majority languages." These need not be exclusive, we can do both.

My misplaced anger you see in this thread comes from my perception of the tone of the 'learn English' side.

that tony benn speech is amazing :p

Over the years, I've worked with a lot of people who are not native English speakers. The one thing that trips me up is when one of them is so utterly brilliant at speaking English that I completely forget they're not a native speaker and start unconsciously throwing in some of the slang and colorful idioms my redneck father has fed me over the years. I always feel bad when I do this because it must sound like I go from perfectly understandable English to complete and utter gibberish in nothing flat! Idioms and slang are really horrible things to inflict upon non-native speakers. I can't imagine what it must be like for a non-native English speaker trying to work with Cockneys or newfies!

Here is a random irony that I like. People today use an Italian phrase describing French, and mean English by it.

There is a lot of media-art / media-philosophy / electronic lit stuff published in German as well. E.g. I would love an English translation of any of Claus Pias's books, or of this generative-art book: http://www.generative-gestaltung.de/about

'yer wain's greetin' -> 'the baby's crying'.

'I'm away tae get woor messages' -> 'I'm going to the shops for food'

It took my a while before I could understand them :-)

Words, grammar and pronunciation are just part of the story.

Dialect on the other hand means words I don't know the definition of, and sometimes there isn't enough context to intuit it.

I assumed that the original comment about 'foreign accents' also encompassed the grammatical tics that foreign speakers often have. Someone speaking grammatically correct english in a strong accent is easily understood, but it only takes a very little grammatical mistake to change to meaning of a sentence. For example, an Italian colleague who missed out a 'to' and told me 'just a minute, I'll come over your desk' caused some admittedly slightly childish giggling in the office...

Innit.

Instead of learning a word like onomatopeia like this:

    on...
    ono...
    onomat...
    onomato...
    onomatopei...
    onomatopeia

    ...a
    ...peia
    ...topeia
    ...matopeia
    ...nomatopeia
    onomatopeia

I have found that this rule is also applicable to almost all Romance languages for English speakers learning, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.

If you are a speaker of a second language, I strongly urge you to try this out yourself and get feedback from a native speaker on your pronunciation.

It's 12 letters, and there's a sort-of pattern in four groups of three with a rhythm. o-n-o, m-a-t, o-p-o, e-i-a. The first and third parts are like rhyming lines in a poem.

That's how I see it, anyway.

For the exact same reason I can see how your method works well as a means of teaching spelling by forcing native speakers to voice all the vowels that native speakers replace with the -schwa sound when pronouncing the full word.

Exploiting the technique above, start with a word in the language of the audience that share phonemes with your target word. From there you essentially play something similar to Lewis Carroll's "Doublets" game from the end to the beginning. So for the word "usually" I would usually start with the city in China, "Guanzhou" and proceed as follows (excuse my poor man's phonetic spelling):

    Gwan-jo
    Gwan-jo
    Gwan-jo
    Gwan-jo
    Gwan-joooo
    Gwan-joooo
    Gwan-joooo
    Gwan-joooo
    Gwan-joooo-aaaa
    Gwan-joooo-aaaa
    Gwan-joooo-aaaa
    Gwan-joooo-aaaa
    Gwan-joo-a-lee
    Gwan-joo-a-lee
    Gwan-joo-a-lee
    Gwan-joo-a-lee
    joo-a-lee
    joo-a-lee
    joo-a-lee
    joo-a-lee
    yoo-joo-a-lee
    yoo-joo-a-lee
    yoo-joo-a-lee
    yoo-joo-a-lee

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi

The fact that Sandhi is often not reflected in our orthography is a mixed blessing. Antai Theesis turning into antithusis would be more phonetically correct but wouldn't preserve the etymology of the combination.

Every language has complexity that seems totally horrible to a foreign learner. German, for example, has three genders, which are to an English speaker completely pointless and annoying. I've yet to study a language that doesn't feel like that, although Spanish is very close to actually making sense: the two genders are 90% a matter of suffix agreement, and the exceptions like "el día" are relatively few and far between.

The pronounciation of the separate words doesn't preserve their etymologies either. This is my main gripe with (spoken) English: greek and to some extent german words (and probably most other words taken from foreign languages) are completely and randomly mutilated, the result confuses everyone who knows what they mean and how they're pronounced properly.

1. A purely phonetic approach means that, even within the UK, I would spell everything differently from my colleagues from Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow etc etc. Not good.

2. English spelling tends to represent the "deep" structure of words rather than the ("shallow") representation - your "thesis - antithesis" is an excellent example of this. This is only frustrating for foreign learners learning pronounciation, but otherwise has a lot to commend it.

3. Our historical orthography creates a link with our history and our culture; I can read Shakespeare even though Elizabethan pronounciation was startlingly different to today's.

2. You're saying people should threat written English words like Chinese glyphs, masquerading as a non-glyph language, and that that's somehow better? My instincts tell me that knowing how to pronounce a word by reading it is more advantageous than having to learn 1000's of glyph-like words, maybe someone else has more knowledge about the tradeoffs between phonetic and glyph like scripts.

3. This is a gimmic. How many times do you estimate the average English speaking person reads these texts in their life?

That means leaving alone anomalies like thesis/antithesis (because "antithesis" pronounced phonetically is actually perfectly intelligible, even using the American antai- prefix which is jarringly different from the British anty-) but it also means tackling the sheer impossibility of telling the doctor you would like medicine for a cough (cow? coup? Seb Coe?) without resorting to acting or a pronunciation dictionary

Shakespearean spelling varied more between early editions than many relatively radical proposed orthographies do from standard English. You can guess the opening words of a 1600 edition of A Midsommer Nights[sic] Dreame : "Now faire Hippolita, our nuptiall hower draws on apase: fower happy daies..." , but ironically only from trying to read it phonetically (the 1623 version is more readable) http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/MND/Q1/defaul...

1. I'd say that the non-phonetic approach allowed this to happen in the first place. In languages where the writing system was pinned to a phonetic system, there is no room for saying something incorrectly. There is room for replacing words and sounds but at least the writing reflects the spoken versions.

2. If you want to go that far, then we ought to just adopt Chinese characters which go a step further and abstract out pronunciation from meaning. That is, it is possible to understand groupings of Chinese characters without even knowing pronunciation. But this system also creates additional problems.

3. I think we have the technology to "bridge" our roots to whatever we create in the future. Today it is actually possible to make something live for eternity thanks to the internet. One good application would be English writing reform if we are to accept that it is the linqua franca.

Consider the possible benefits:

* 2nd language learners will have a much easier learning curve and thus be able to transition from their first language to English more quickly * World communication would increase--I think this has war-stopping potential (or peace creating potential) * Translations would hopefully become more accurate (less secondary translation/interpretation needed)--things written in "new" English would be more accessible to a larger audience. * Areas dominated by native English speakers would open up to a larger audience, thus creating more competition and more contributions by people of other backgrounds other than pure English.

For example, right now we are seeing dominance in technology/internet by English speakers, but why should that remain the case? As such traveling to a non-English speaking country often feels like going back 5-10 years because much of their tech experience is based on companies paying for translations or waiting for local companies to copy the technology.

I actually think we have the capability of making "new English" for both existing native speakers and new speakers. For example for native speakers, we could write an input method that automatically identifies words, spelling, or grammatical structures that have been deprecated and may not be understood by "new English" learners.

We also have the ability to write and document English to new English translations and historical references. There will certainly be some fallout but we currently don't document many language shifts that happen even among smaller populations.

I'm sure many exceptional native English writers and culturally engrained speakers will balk at such an idea. My challenge would be to have them learn Chinese or some other not so closely related foreign language to the same fluency they can speak English in order for them to understand the pain of learning a new and complex language. Of course I am not happy with the loss of culture, but I think for the advancement of the world at large, such a path is inevitable.

That's quite an unfortunate example: it comes straight from classic Greek (another very bitchy language when it comes to pronunciation pseudo-rules), and percolated into Latin and eventually English.

Still, I agree large chunks of current English pronunciation "rules" (rules? what rules?) just don't make any sense from a logical perspective; proof is that even born-and-bread Englishmen can often struggle with spelling well into their late 20s and beyond, regardless of education level.

* Dutch is a similar 'power language' you can combine any 2 nouns in any order to create new words. For a native speaker, the meaning then is obvious.

Then I am 31 years old and move from Finland to London and need to spell (dictate letter by letter) my name in a bank – something I have never done in my life. I do it really slowly, and the bank clerk probably thinks I am borderline retarded, can't even spell his own name, something even kids learn to do. :-D

Plus we have ce/ci/ge/gi/che/chi/ghe/ghi as the only exceptions, no doubled consonnants or actually any doubled other letter for no obvious reason, no long or short sounds. If I want a long "e" (we pronounce "e" - "eh"), I write it "ee" (duh!). Idea = idee. You can hear it, you can write it. You can read it, you can say it. EZ!

What we actually learn during school is higher level grammar: syntax, semantics. I'd say that Romanian is like the Python of natural languages :)

(same for other phonetic languages)

Even as a thoroughly American monolingual English speaker, I didn't get that until high school. The stress moves from the first to the second syllable thanks to the addition of a suffix two syllables distant. God help a non-native speaker trying to understand why that happens; I'm not even sure I do.

If I could change anything in English, or German that would be introducing this same set of writing "rules" as in Serbian or Croatian. I would even go so far as to replacing all europeaan alphabets with phonetic transcriptions[1] that I used to see in older English dictionaries or something similar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karadzic#Linguistic_reform... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

If you really want to standardise English spelling, then 'kompyuter', 'halapenyo', an 'fyored' would be the targets. The only problem is that when you start doing phonetic spelling (against a standard accent), you start to lose the semantic link between words - it's no longer clear which words share roots.

For me, American English is my native language, but I am also half Brazilian and learned Portuguese from childhood trips to Brazil (I didn't properly learn until I was 12). Because I was exposed to Portuguese at a young age I have excellent pronunciation and decent grammar, but I never spent enough time living there to pick up a broad vocabulary. So actually my expressiveness Portuguese is quite weak even though people's first impression might be that it is perfect until we get into a serious conversation and I struggle to come up with the right words and expressions.

I often contrast this with my mother and father who learned the language pairs as adults, but did so in a serious academic setting. I have less of an accent than both of them in their opposing language, but they both have a much stronger overall command. Sometimes I meet someone with a very thick accent that is hard to decipher at first, but they speak very quickly and with excellent grammar and vocabulary.

So it's clear to me that accent and language skills are orthogonal. Many immigrants hit a wall with their accent because it's good enough, and they get more added value from improving their grammar and vocabulary. Clearly I think pg touched on the important point that entrepreneurs generally talk fast about complicated and novel ideas, so an accent is more likely to get in the way as compared to normal interactions. However it's just the tip of the iceberg, and I think the average American lives a more sheltered life in terms of the reality of having to learn another language than any other country.

That, in fact, is directly in line with pg's point.

His point was that you have to get to "good enough" and not doing so is a real problem. However he went on to make it clear that if your accent does not impede communication, then it is a non-issue.

1) As a parent of English-speaking children, I thought it was VITAL that they learn well the main consistent sound-symbol correspondence rules of English spelling. (This is called "phonics" in the context of teaching reading to native speakers of English.) My favorite book recommendation for this is Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach, by linguist Leonard Bloomfield and lexicographer Clarence Barnhart. All four of my children learned to read well with this book. The book is now in a second edition

http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-A-Linguistic-Approach/dp/081...

prepared by a second generation of the Barnhart family. Learning to read with an approach like this is dialect-friendly (the book is specifically organized to take into account dialect differences, at least within American English) and systematic for understanding what is consistent in English spelling and what is not.

2) As for spelling reform in English, I think it was HN user gnosis who once shared a very interesting link

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html

about English spelling reform by a commentator who knows linguistics well. English spelling reform is often desired by native speakers of the language, but it is a tough problem. See what the link has to say about various proposals for spelling reform.

From this experience I learned that the process of learning a new accent is totally separate from learning a language as most people do it. You need to master IPA as well as carry a mirror to watch your own lips and have good close-up reference material. As evidenced by all the mediocre accents in movies it's not a foolproof process, but it can certainly get you much closer to your goal.

I experienced this phenomenon first hand as a native English speaker with an Australian accent. At my first hostel abroard there was a mixed group of european (non UK) people conversing in English, and I thought I'd try and join in.

me: howrya?

group: blank stares

me: how are you?

group: blank stares

me: how - are - you?

group: look of fear

me: hello?

This first experience was definitely a shock, and it took me some time to realise what it must have been like for the group.

In terms of learning to understand native speakers, travelling in their country for an extended period seems to work. My family has hosted many international guests through exchange programs, including adult guests who had never left their home country (but were taught English at school). Communication was sometimes very difficult, but universally the guests were able to pick up on the Australian accent over time. When exchanges move from blank looks to questions about particular words used, you can start having clunky conversations.

The exchange programs did give our family tips on how to converse with the guests. The only tip I can remember is to try and use different words. Often the longer and fancier word (e.g. gigantic, massive) is easier to understand for the guest than the short and simple word (e.g. big).

This would require linguists to document the phonemes, and to find a minimal set of alterations of either the spelling or the pronounciation of a word so that you have a phonetic system. There are already variations in spelling (American/British English). This would be another variation which is phonetic.

Of course, even if this this work is done, it would still be yet another standard needing popular adoption. The phonemes would also be more in number than the current letters which means either using diacritic symbols (requiring change in keyboards, slower typing) or mapping a phoneme to multiple letters (longer spellings and possibly some ambiguity in detecting phoneme boundaries in spellings).

In any case this post shows perfectly how important it is to learn languages early on. In Germany you start learning English in 3rd grade and even before school there are kindergartens in which multiple languages are spoken. If you go to a Gymnasium and want to graduate with the abitur you need to be able to speak at least one foreign language or two, if you don't want to focus on sciences.

In TV series UK people tend to talk BBC-alike English, in my experience this is not what is always talked in the streets in UK... so I'll get better understanding tv series but maybe my understanding of street language may not improve a lot.

Btw TV series definitely help a lot in general, and I used to do that, the only problem is that it is a time consuming task.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawlermen_%28TV_series%29

What I find amusing is that as someone from the area in question it appears that most of the people being filmed are trying hard to talk "properly" - their real accents would be much thicker.

For the opposite problem, try reading Iain Banks' Feersum Endjinn[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn

I don't hold it against someone if they can't understand me though; the British can't even understand each other, so I can imagine how difficult it can be for people from elsewhere :)

That definitely can be the case, also I observed intermitting slow and very fast speeds in the same sentence in order to put the emphasis in different parts of the sentence.

I don't really understand the whole uproar over people's grasp of English. If someone's less proficient, or slower to respond; I wait patiently or simplify my own English to make it easier to understand. I'm genuinely impressed by how much effort everyone else puts in to learning the language that I can't hold someone's skill in it against them. The best I can achieve in another language is to describe how my car broke down in German.

If all the people in the world reasoned like you we would all live in a better place..

1. Shakespearean pronunciation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

2. Problems that would be caused by simplifying spelling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

3. Power of Babel: http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Babel-Natural-Language/dp/00...

4. Toastmasters speech about "Manglish": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDanVi6byKo (Toastmasters has its own version of English, full of over the top gestures. Also recommended, search for Singlish on Youtube.)

- I took about 30 lessons of one-on-one tutoring through Skype. It really helps to have someone who is paid to hear your bad English, and to have the patience to point to you the mistakes that you are making. This costs about 20€ per hour, but it is worth it.

- Read out loud. There was a period of about a month where I did this at least one hour per day. I read books, articles, even RFCs. It does wonders.

- Made a good use of the "pronounce feature" that most dictionaries have nowadays.

- Saw youtube videos on pronunciation and common mistakes.

I also wrote a lot, about 2000 words per day (I wrote a AutoHotKey script to count number of times I hit space on any given day). Perhaps 2000 words is too much, and it tends to favor verbosity over succinctness. But you will get a LOT of practice.

It also helps to read/hear good writers/speakers. I don't like movies/tv so much, as they have a low speech to time ratio.

The first lesson is free, so one can always give it a try.

What makes me sad is that by being honest and wanting to help founders, PG just got a new shit load of problems from people over-reacting. Do you really think he'll give great, but controversial, feedback in his next interviews/articles?

Imagine yourself to be forced to speak Japanese to gain your money, because you have no alternatives. How you would feel if all your efforts will be worthless just because you're born in the wrong side of the world, and you sound funny.

The problem is that many English speaker have no idea how is like to learn another language, hence they lack of empathy.

    Imagine yourself to be forced to speak Japanese to gain your money, because you have no alternatives.

I can understand having empathy for some people where English is pushed down their throat. But, for founders applying to YC and going to the Valley? Please. Why would anyone invest any money or take seriously a CEO that doesn't take his/her work seriously. (Yes, communicating well for a CEO is very important. What about a programmer that can't code?)

Imagine a Steve Jobs explaining to the world how Apple is great with a foreign accent that nobody can't understand.

The school you went to matters. Your height matters. Your appearance matters. Your family matters. Where you live matters. The amount of money you have matters. It always been and will always be. Faster you understand it and start putting the chances on your side, the better you will be.

I believe there needs to be room for honest realistic views to be voiced - even if you don't like the reality they describe.

PG did not say that janitors need to polish their accent - he's talking about startup founders. These are the guys that want to strike it rich, let's be real. If you want to "make it" in this part of the world, deal with the fact that command of English is expected from company founders here.

And yes - it's not my native language either.

One trick/method that I used while perfecting my German accent was shadowing that I found in a lanaguage forum somewhere. I took a book that I understood in the target language, in this case it was Agatha Christie's Murder on the Links; bought the audio book ( Mord auf dem Links), then repeated after the reader at pace without looking at the text. It was tiring mentally sometimes, but it helped greatly in pronunciation and aural comprehension of the target langauge.

I did the same for movies. I remember getting the Matrix in German. Technical writing is different I guess but I hope this helps someone, at the very least, in acquiring an idiomatic proficiency.

I've learned more grammar watching tv series than actually studying grammar for years in school, and my pronunciation improved too. Now many things just come naturally.

And i can understand the issues he's having with pronunciation, without a constant reference to how something should be pronounced you tend to ignore the correct pronunciation of words you don't know (but you can deduce the meaning while reading) an build up a collection of words with completely broken pronunciation that you will end up using in actual conversation. With hideous results...

However a solid understanding of grammar helps. For example in your post you wrote "like if doing". Correct would be "as if doing" since "as if" is a conjunction and "like" is a preposition. It was probably just a typo, and you would have caught it during a proof-read since it sounds "wrong" but actual grammar knowledge will confirm any suspicions.

Although opportunity of living here is somewhat luxurious for many. So I would say that listening to as much native English as possible is really good for grammar :)

Regarding real immersion (both listening and speaking) maybe personal tutors via skype or language learning communities could be a cheap alternative, i've never really tried this approach (lazyness) but i've thought for years it could have been worth the price.

My favourite example is the pronunciation of the math symbol Pi in a European meeting in which everyone and their dog would be tempted to say something like "pih" except a native speaker. Or try asking for the nearest Ikea.

Pi is pronounced the way it is because a bunch of people in the C16th decided to reconstruct classical Greek pronunciation & teach that to students in England. Mix with the great vowel shift (some of which was later reversed for Greek letters in the C19th, but in different ways in the US and the UK) and you end up with the odd mix of pronunciations we have today, with UK and US English disagreeing. At least according to this stackexchange post anyway: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11363/why-are-gre...

Only in those european countries that dub foreign language movies. In the countries where they subtitle them instead, the exposure to spoken English comes much sooner without the need for formal lessons.

This attitude was really surprising to me.

For me, when speaking your non-native language, the aim should be to sound like a native (or with the accent of some subset of the native-speaking population).

I wonder how widespread this "X is my native tongue, so I'm going to speak English in a strong X accent, because otherwise I'd be submerging my identity" attitude is?

I hope you understand that hiding own accent is not the easiest thing and requires some effort even after lots of training. Our vocal apparatus is adapted to our mother tongue, so even if we are capable of speaking all English phonemes, not all of them are "natural" for us.

It's especially discouraging when so many job ads require hyper-ultra-mega-puts-Bill-Clinton-to-shame communication skills for software development positions. I understand the value of communication, but I've successfully done remote gigs for companies where we don't even talk to each other. Just hand me the spec and I'll build it. If I have any doubts I'll write you an email, with the added benefit of having everything in writing and being able to re-read it later.

Mandarin speakers from different regions (Hong Kong, Taiwan, different parts of China, Malaysia, Singapore) speak in different accents but we usually don't have problem understanding each other (yeah, sometimes we make fun of the different accents).

There are other languages that suffer from the same problem. Brazilian Portuguese differs greatly from Portugal's, which is also different from East Timor's. I don't know much about Spanish and French but I assume the situation is analogous.

It's important to note that such differences between colonies and their colonizers were once a strong argument towards independence.

I've attempted and now partially understand, read, write, and speak Spanish, Swedish, German. Having experienced all of the intricacies of other languages, I don't envy those who are far behind me trying to make it in an English.

That being said, what's the lesson learned, or probably more apt - what's the solution? This is why firms like YC exist, is to provide support to founders that lack all of the acumen (and trust me, there's a lot) that is required for 21st century business leaders. There's often a meta discussion here on HN about the "technical co-founder vs business co-founder". This is one area where having a business co-founder with great communication skills is a great reason to partner up with that person. Unfortunately those who do lack communication skills often find it difficult to understand those who do have good communication skills.

I wish I could help somehow...

You only need to launch another successful project which will in time develop a strong international community like redis, then you'll speak and write English like a native. :)

I'm a native English speaker and I don't understand why people do this. If you are trying to have a conversation with someone, surely you want to do what is necessary for everyone to be understood as well as possible. It is only a little effort for you to slow down and simplify your speech, but it is impossible for the other person to learn better English on the spot. I lived in Hong Kong for a while and some US/UK people still wouldn't adapt their accent, even though the locals were humouring them by speaking English to them in the first place.

Perhaps it is easier for me to empathise given I have a (now very mild) Yorkshire accent, which was consistently mocked when I moved to London, and is reasonably slow paced anyway.

I think the whole "accent" controversy misses the mark. Having grown up with an immigrant parent, I know how frequently he was mocked for his accent. Of course, I could always understand and act as the mediator. This has served me well in the rest of my life. If only we all had the same benefit.

I've been writing about effective language learning techniques since 2000, with an emphasis on pronunciation (which is an oft-neglected topic in English classrooms). The site is written in simple English, so if you're a native speaker of English, don't be put off by the spartan writing style.

I'm German and my experience has always been that English is a very simple language and yet versatile enough to allow for very nuanced expression.

  I redacted a  text, removing the froufrou.
  Eu redigi um texto, removendo o frufru.

This is one of the first things one professor said to us at his first lecture when I went to faculty.

English is definitely phonetically-inconsistent (it's almost funny how many different sounds vowels, diphthongs, etc. can make). I realized this a while ago, and suddenly felt sorry for people learning English.

However, to dismiss the difference between spoken English and "textbook English" as some problem endemic to the English language is superficial. Colloquial versions of languages are almost always different than what is taught in standard coursework.

Further, arrogantly claiming that English is broken because he, a non-native speaker, can't understand UK English is idiotic - I can barely understand a Caribbean Spanish accent, compared to a "textbook" Latin American one, but that doesn't mean Spanish is "broken." I can understand a UK accent pretty well, as can most native speakers.

Most languages have really weird problems and seem completely illogical (just from what I know personally, Russian has a phonology which can get complicated, due to the stress system), and mastering any of them is very difficult and usually sucks. It's been my experience that many people who tout the number of languages they know or claim to be a "polyglot" are actually very unskilled in day-to-day use of the language. No matter what you see in movies, a character who could intuitively speak, read and write 6 diverse languages on a colloquial level would be an exceptional human being.

The crux of the issue is that by repeating themselves a little louder and at the same speed, a native speaker is treating the (non-native) listener as a linguistic equal. If my brother doesn't understand what I said, it is almost certainly due to the volume of my speech relative to our listening environment, not my content. To assume otherwise would insult his intelligence. If I'm speaking to a non-native speaker, my natural instinct is to extend the same courtesy. It isn't laziness or a lack of empathy. (You could argue it was lazy to speak that way in the first place, but to rephrase it after the fact would be condescending)

I used to work for a company based in Tokyo and, through practice and frustration, learned how to modulate my idiom-laden, Missouri-accented, high-speed, low-volume drawl into something at least partially intelligible to my Japanese colleagues. It required a lot of effort and still sounds strange out of context. If I spoke to my father the same way, he'd laugh at me.

As an American, I think it would be really helpful if part of our education included speaking (and listening to) English as it is spoken by non-natives. We should have to practice listening to and understanding various common accents (South Asian, Chinese, Nigerian, etc), practice making ourselves understood, and learn how to graciously ask for (or give) re-phrasing or clarification.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6304783

(I'm not affiliated.)

Scottish, Irish or just about every accent out there sound like weird sounds the first time you hear them and you actually have to focus hard to figure out what the fk that person just said.

Written English may be the same everywhere but spoken English varies greatly from region to region.

I watch a lot of English movies without subtitles, so I can understand (at least American English), but I'm afraid of speaking, and I have troubles with pronouncing even basic words.

At childhood I was astonished by spelling scene in translated american film:

  - Как пишется "кот" # How to spell cat?
  - К О Т # C A T

Later on I've learned english by reading. Direct mapping to known phonemes gives very rough accent. To change it one has to be aware: things are not as they seem. Reading hidden language helps a lot:

  $ curl http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html | htmlfmt | espeak --ipa -q
  dˈiəɹəst kɹˈiːtʃəɹ ɪn kɹiːˈeɪʃən
  stˈʌdɪ ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ pɹənˌʌnsɪˈeɪʃən
  aɪ wɪl tˈiːtʃ juː ɪn maɪ vˈɜːs
  sˈaʊndz lˈaɪk kˈɔːps
  kˈɔː
  hˈɔːs
  and wˈɜːs
  aɪ wɪl kˈiːp juː
  sˈuːzɪ
  bˈɪzɪ
  mˌeɪk jɔː hˈɛd wɪð hˈiːt ɡɹˈəʊ dˈɪzɪ
  tˈiəɹ ɪn ˈaɪ
  jɔː dɹˈɛs wɪl tˈeə
  sˌəʊ ʃˌal ˈaɪ
  ˈəʊ hˈiə maɪ pɹˈeə