not being fluent (or being less-than-native) in the language of the community with which you are conversing makes everything harder
I’ve felt this a lot. This is nothing shocking or revolutionary, but communicating well in a foreign language is hard. I’m an American who grew up speaking English, and I’ve spent most of my adult life outside of the US in places where English is not widely spoken. I was a monolingual anglophone at age 18, and I’ve learned three non-English languages as an adult. I’ve often wanted to express “college level ideas” but I’ve had “toddler grammar.” I remember talking about an app ecosystem in Spanish, but I didn’t express the idea well and the other person thought I was talking about ecology. I have had dozens of attempts to express nuance in Chinese, but I simply didn’t know how to express it in that language. To be clear, I am comfortably conversational in both of these languages,[1] but being able to talk about your weekend plans or explain why you liked a movie is far more simple than describing a pipeline of community building or being able to talk about how universal basic income would work.
While I haven’t attended in-person EA events, I could easily see people being evaluated heavily on accent and word choice, to the detriment of the content of their message.
Shamefully, I also find myself regularly judging other people based on this exact thing: they don’t express their ideas well, so I assume that they aren’t particularly intelligent. Shame on me. I am trying to do this less. It is an obvious bias, but we often aren’t aware of it. It is kind of a halo effect, where we judge one thing based on another thing being impressive/unimpressive.
Or at least I was when I was at my peak. It has been about 8 years since I’ve lived in Spain, and because I’ve used Spanish very little since then I assume that it has degraded a lot.
I’ve felt this a lot. This is nothing shocking or revolutionary, but communicating well in a foreign language is hard. I’m an American who grew up speaking English, and I’ve spent most of my adult life outside of the US in places where English is not widely spoken. I was a monolingual anglophone at age 18, and I’ve learned three non-English languages as an adult. I’ve often wanted to express “college level ideas” but I’ve had “toddler grammar.” I remember talking about an app ecosystem in Spanish, but I didn’t express the idea well and the other person thought I was talking about ecology. I have had dozens of attempts to express nuance in Chinese, but I simply didn’t know how to express it in that language. To be clear, I am comfortably conversational in both of these languages,[1] but being able to talk about your weekend plans or explain why you liked a movie is far more simple than describing a pipeline of community building or being able to talk about how universal basic income would work.
While I haven’t attended in-person EA events, I could easily see people being evaluated heavily on accent and word choice, to the detriment of the content of their message.
Shamefully, I also find myself regularly judging other people based on this exact thing: they don’t express their ideas well, so I assume that they aren’t particularly intelligent. Shame on me. I am trying to do this less. It is an obvious bias, but we often aren’t aware of it. It is kind of a halo effect, where we judge one thing based on another thing being impressive/unimpressive.
Or at least I was when I was at my peak. It has been about 8 years since I’ve lived in Spain, and because I’ve used Spanish very little since then I assume that it has degraded a lot.