Some common mistakes Indians make while communicating in English |
Posted: March 24, 2017 |
some common mistakes Indians make while communicating in English
By: Steve Denton, Quora
In my experience of working with Indians in the IT sector, and especially with Indian colleagues who are based 'offshore' in India, or visiting on a placement at our UK offices, the main problem is not in their written communication. Apart from the occasional confusion surrounding homophones (e.g. there <->their, hear<->here, etc.), the omission of prepositions and articles, and a few grammatical errors, their written English is reasonably comprehensible.
Firstly, they tend to place less importance on emphasis and intonation. (At least, that's how it sounds to the untrained ear - perhaps the differences are simply too subtle for non-speakers to detect.) This makes their delivery much 'flatter' and more monotone.
relative, and proceeded to chatter away at a blistering rate in Slovak. After the rest of us had sat there for a while, listening to her rapid-fire conversation and blinking at each other in bemused astonishment, my friend's wife, a Taiwanese girl whom I had not previously suspected of having a wry English sense of humour, suddenly remarked, to much hilarity, 'It okay - I breathe for her!')
Problems occur when Indian speakers impose the speech patterns of their native languages onto English, and speak it in the same way as they would, say, Hindi or Bengali - i.e. with virtually no discernable emphasis or intonation, and extremely rapidly, and with no natural pauses between phrases or sentences. (I have heard that in Indian culture being able to speak very quickly is considered a mark of high intelligence. In fact, there is very little correlation between the two, and in certain European cultures a propensity for extremely rapid speech will not succeed in impressing people with your supposed intelligence, but merely lead them to suspect that you have drunk waaay too much coffee, or perhaps have a cocaine habit...)
call from India, while sitting in a meeting room with English colleagues. As our eyes meet across the table and we study each other's frowning, baffled expressions, we realize that none of us has any idea what the guy is saying! Of course, being British, we are too polite to interrupt him and ask him to repeat himself, and to speak more slowly and clearly, so we just let him finish and then ask him to confirm everything he has just said in an email - as a mere procedural formality, of course...)
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