🇵🇳No One Knows English and What to Do About It 🇲🇸
The more I work with foreign colleagues, the more I'm convinced of something that's hardly ever mentioned in school, university, or courses:
The main problem is not "knowing how to write/say something correctly," but "how to understand when your interlocutor is making a mistake"
So, here's the thing: absolutely everyone makes mistakes all the time
People make mistakes not only grammatically, but also lexically, and ESPECIALLY WITH LOGICAL MISTAKES THAT ARE HARD TO CATCH
You know when you get your thoughts mixed up and write not: "we sent the letter to the customer for review" – but: "I'm a stupid idiot" – well, it's happened to all of us, right? right?... damn T9... but that's not the point, I'm saying that we often make mistakes in our own language due to fatigue, stress, or just because we're trying to write "something" in the hopes that we'll be understood
The same thing happens with people who communicate with you in English
This happens especially often with native speakers, because they're used to writing however they want, since their fellow citizens will understand them, so they assume you will too
And then you're sitting there, reading the nonsense that your foreign colleague sent you, thinking: "Am I really that bad at English? What's this 'stupid idiot' thing? They know English, so it must be me who doesn't understand what's written..." – and with that confidence that the other person did everything correctly, you start digging into something that was never right to begin with
This problem is very easy to fix:
If you can't understand what your interlocutor wrote or you have a tiny bit of doubt about the correctness of what's written, ALWAYS ask for clarification about what they meant
Any specialist who's worked with foreign colleagues for more than a year is already used to clarifying their thoughts and finding alternative ways to convey information – this is the norm in international correspondence
In short, sometimes you need to understand that it's not you who's an idiot (even if you are), but your interlocutor, because everyone can be an idiot sometimes