Nick Sacco founded Connect English in San Diego and has spent twenty years teaching English to students from thirty or forty countries at a time. He came on to talk about how to actually connect with someone when you don't share a language.

The most useful part is the practical half. Slow your speech down by about ten percent and people understand far more. Cut phrasal verbs, so "she got angry with me" rather than "she went off on me," because there are thousands of those and none of them are guessable. Drop idioms, since "right off the bat" means nothing to someone from a country that doesn't play baseball. And counterintuitively, reach for the more technical word rather than the simpler one: most learners studied English from textbooks, so "frequently" lands faster than "often," and its Latin root gives Spanish, Portuguese and Italian speakers something to grab.

Nick also makes a point I hadn't considered, which is that mispronunciation gets read as low intelligence, and it's usually just that the sound doesn't exist in the speaker's first language. If your language has no short i, you cannot hear the difference between ship and sheep, let alone say it. He teaches people the physical mechanics and they start hearing it within a couple of weeks.

My own version of this is intellectual discomfort. Put a confident person in a setting they've never been in and they'll come across as far less capable than they are. That's what speaking a new language does to somebody.

There's also a story about two students nearly coming to blows over whether eating horse is acceptable, what Nick learned from Muslim students about introductions, and why his school runs a food week.

Find Nick at https://www.connectenglishsandiego.com and Connect English on Instagram.