I’m sitting at the high table inside the bistro with my sister. It’s my birthday, and I’m getting antsy waiting for this year’s birthday cake design. Last year it was a giant Polly Pocket with me as Polly inside it. What’s this year going to look like? The waitress approaches, and my attention lands softly back on Earth.
As she takes our order, I notice she has this cool Greek-American accent. I start thinking about how much I love how unique our accents are, and how they give a quick look into where a person is from and where they’ve spent most of their lives. I’m brought back to our table when I hear her say in Greek, frustrated: “I’m sorry, I’m just so tired today. I can’t think of the word I’m looking for.”
“No worries,” we both say. We hadn’t even noticed she was taking longer, let alone minded!
She goes on. “No, for real, I feel so stupid all the time. It’s like I have no personality in Greek!”
Nothing could have prepared me for this gem. I’ve taught non-native speakers for years on end, but no one had ever put it so clearly.
People have always come to me to “become more fluent,” to “be more confident in English,” to “work on their vocabulary.”
That last one is what I hear the most. Non-native speakers think they need more words, more phrases; they ask for phrasal verbs, prepositions, all sorts of things. It’s my job to guide them strategically, and the words are rarely the real problem. I know the underlying need:
“I don’t want to be afraid.“
“I want to feel enough.“
In an attempt to feel enough in a conversation, non-native speakers try to cover their bases; more words feel like more safety.
That’s why I never ask the people I work with what they need help with in the language. It’s like a doctor asking a patient what kind of pills they’d like. No sirree, Bob!
I ask them what they want to be able to do in the language.
One of dozens and dozens of examples is an IT engineer who approached me a while back. He was looking for conversation classes for his new position. I asked him about the new job and the day-to-day, but since he had yet to start, I asked to read the job description. He’d essentially be working as a mediator between the client side and the developers. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars per deal. This clearly wasn’t conversation classes to me.
It was sales, negotiation skills, empathy in communication, boundary setting, confidence and opinion markers. So we focused on role-playing real-life scenarios. I may or may not have given him an extra hard time. Just looking out for him! 😇
He didn’t need more English.
What he needed was the English that lets you be someone: the words to disagree, to push back, to give an opinion, to make a joke land. That’s where personality lives, and it’s exactly what most of us were never taught.
Which brings me back to our waitress. She didn’t have a personality problem, or a tiredness problem. She had the Greek to take an order, but not yet the Greek to be herself, in the language and the culture. And that is learnable.
I assured her that her Greek personality would come out, with the right words, Mediterranean temperament and all!
