Quote:
Originally Posted by Green-Eggs
Spot on. I worked with a Chinese guy who you couldn't understand anything he said in English, and not just the accent. But his written English was college-level perfection. It was a strange paradox.
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It's very common in most countries, including mine, to study English as a second language in schools. To pass exams, your spelling and grammar have to be textbook perfect. Better than some native English speakers, in fact (we know the difference between your and you're).
But many of these countries don't speak English daily, so conversational skills can be very rudimentary. Mainly limited to ordering food and cussing out people (the first thing any non-native English speaker learns lol). Certainly not enough to have an engineering troubleshooting session. Add to the fact that technical terms sometimes don't directly translate into foreign languages, e.g. brake caliper in Cantonese (a Chinese dialect) translated to English means 'abalone' (a seafood).
Sorry for the tangent. Thought might be interesting knowledge.