When you learn to speak a foreign language, you don’t necessarily end up always speaking the same language as a native speaker. Not until you have had years of practice.
But even after years of speaking a second language, you may occasionally get tripped up. People from different places have unique dialects and idioms, even though they have a common language structure.
As a Parisian, I sometimes struggle with the French spoken in eastern Canada. And though I have been speaking and working in English for the past 30 years, I still occasionally use a word or phrase that doesn’t get the result intended. Especially here, with both Americans and Brits in large numbers. For example, I can express displeasure to an American colleague by telling him I am “pissed.” But if I told my friends from England I was “pissed” they would assume I was drunk.
For many expatriates living and working in Prague, the need for a common language is a necessity, and English is usually the one preferred. Though Russian and German are still very much spoken in Central and Eastern Europe, English remains the international language, is used by many of us, and is taught as the second language almost everywhere in the world.
To avoid misunderstanding and confusion, I suggest the following:
Simplify your sentence structure and vocabulary. This is particularly important for English speakers who have been raised in the United Kingdom, where the breadth of one’s vocabulary and the ability to use complex grammatical structures reflects (to some extent) one’s education and position in society. For many non-native English speakers, a simple vocabulary (where one word is consistently used to mean the same thing) and simpler sentences go a long way toward increasing communication effectiveness. For example, use “big”, which is widely understood, and avoid synonyms (“huge”, “large”, “immense”, etc.).
Avoid sports English. In the U.S. and in Canada, many phrases come from either baseball (“covering all the bases”, “far out in left field”, “three strikes and you’re out”, etc.) or football (“fumbling”, “running interference”, “one down, three to go”, etc.). These phrases mean virtually nothing to people who do not know these sports – and that is a very large portion of the world’s population. The same goes for references to TV shows or American and British celebrities.
Beware of the differences between versions of English. British and American English assign different meanings to phrases, sometimes resulting in significant confusion. For example, stating that a project is a “bomb” is very positive in the UK (where a bomb is a spectacular success) and very negative in the USA (where a bomb is a catastrophic failure). When a Brit lucks out he is out of luck, but for an American, to luck out means success. Keep in mind that, in continental Europe, in Africa and in the Middle East, non-native English speakers study British English.
One of the many benefits of speaking the ‘same’ language is that it helps develop relationships and build trust. But regardless of how many languages we speak, we need to remember that building trust among people from different languages and cultures is a complex process which encompass not only what we say but also how we say it as well as when and where we say it.