Working in a language that isn't your native one. How hard was it?

Honestly, I feel this on a spiritual level — or, well, an infernal one.

My native language is PHP, which, as everyone knows, is the demonically fluent tongue of the Ninth Circle. Down there, variables appear from the void, arrays shift shape without warning, and error messages read like ancient curses. Beautiful stuff.

Recently I tried picking up Rust, which people kept hyping as some kind of angelic, higher-order language… but after using it, I’m convinced it’s just the void teaching itself self-esteem. Every compiler message sounds like: “I’m perfect. You’re the problem.”

So yeah — working in a non-native language is tough. But if I can survive switching between demon-speak and cosmic-void-whispering, you’ll be fine too.

I speak 4 languages fluently. Here is what helped:

1- Speak slowly. Don't rush it

2- Its fine to formulate what you want to say in your mind before saying it. take your time.

3- Use a phone and record yourself speaking about different subject. Practice, practice and practice.

4- Some audiences are harder than others. French people for example tend to nitpick and want you to be really fluent. While most english speakers are fine with your speaking, but it depends on the audience and who you are speaking to.

5- You obviously need to immerse yourself in the language you want to speak. Tv-shows, Movies, News and even tabloid. The latter is actuallt good to understand jokes, innuendos and other subtle conversations.

One thing I also noted, is that if you follow/watch people who are not native speakers, they actually tend to explain things/concepts better. Because they are limited in words and have limited scope compared to native speaker. Anyone remarked this?

On the other side, one thing I have tried to be more mindful of, as a native English speaker often working with nearshore contractors, is speaking and writing more simply. Enunciating more, slowing down a bit, and using fewer idioms can go a long way towards making ESL coworkers more comfortable.

Funny enough, back when I worked with a Southeast Asian team, we all spoke English. Native languages were Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, Mandarin, Ukrainian and so on. But most people wouldn't be able to speak these languages, so we mostly used English.

The customer was often Indonesian and would write bug reports in the language. The non-Indo speakers would just run them through Google translate and comment what they understood and those who were native speakers would correct them if they were mistaken. Especially when there's sarcasm or some cultural context.

There were a few who only spoke the Chinese dialects, and we'd use an intermediary in meetings, and AI/Google translate on text and code. This was also a good use of AI - it was fluent in whatever language, Java or Mandarin and could piece them together well.

Anyway, yeah, it's workable. Nobody knows all the languages. In engineering, there's more empathy for this, especially from the multilinguals.