Le Baron wrote:And yet when native English speakers actually do go the route of "speaking in ways that are accessible to everyone, using simple words and phrases", they're portrayed as 'talking loudly and simplifying as though non-English people are idiots.'
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I think mokibao has a quite important point here:
mokibao wrote:
Also, words like holistic don't stump people, because fancy words tend to be cognates. (Holistic, as it turns out, is olistico in Italian, holístico in Spanish... you get the idea.) The real difficulty lies in very idiomatic expressions (such as you hit it out of the park indeed), slang patterns, regionalisms, and above all locutions whose meaning is completely different from that of its constituent words: see off, draw back, make out, and so on. Non-native speakers aren't adept at using them and will avoid them in favor of equivalent words that don't follow this confusing pattern.
When natives "dumb down" their speech they often do not know how to to this correctly. They may even make it more complicaed for a foreigner. This is a problem not only English natives are facing.
Natives may not explain words that are easy for children. However, the same words may be unknown to foreigners. On the other hand natives may consider latin-based ("fancy") words as complicated, while those are usually easy to understand for adult non-natives.
By choosing more words suitable for children, the speech may be more difficult to understand for a non-native. So if you adjust your language, always keep in mind whom you are talking to.
When I think about German speaking foreigners, an example would be that they overuse words like "studieren" and "praktizieren" (study and practise). Most of the times a native would use "lernen" and "üben", words with germanic roots, instead of "studieren" and "praktizieren". Children however, barely use "studieren" or "praktizieren" at all. (Note that the German "studieren" refers almost exclusively to studies at a university or similar institution, so oftentimes it is not the right translation for the English word "to study".)
Another aspect is, that one does not have to speak louder, but articulate the words more clearly. (The foreigners are most likely not deaf.) Background noise is more disturbing for foreigners, so then you may indeed have to raise your voice a bit, because they cannot fill in gaps so well. When speaking to a foreigner it can help to actually speak into their direction and complete your sentences.
From my own experience I can say that walking in front of native speakers made it easier to follow their conversation than walking behind them. Just because it meant they were talking into my direction.