What if I genuinely don’t understand what they’re saying, and neither does anyone in my team? This happened many times. Is this racism or a practical inconvenience?
I find the sensitivity on this topic regarding racism kind of overshadowing the practical aspect of not being able to understand what the other person is saying.
We offer people in our company English language training, because we’re a world wide remote company and everyone should be able to understand each other. Is this racism as well?
> What if I genuinely don’t understand what they’re saying, and neither does anyone in my team?
This sounds like a severe deficiency in your team, but it's not hard for you to learn to handle other accents.
Learned helplessness is not an excuse.
Does your company offer courses to help you speak English with a more Filipino accent? If not, why not?
I actually happen to be in The Philippines right now, so funny you mention that.
No of course we don’t, and neither do we offer one with a more Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, Thai or German accent. This is because we decided upon American-English as the language, which is also reflected in the grammar choices on our website (despite being a French company).
The courses are entirely optional. Some colleagues don’t take them, and they have problems communicating with customers, which is very frustrating. I’ve had an Indian manager of a customer complain that one of our Thai support engineers was incomprehensible, and my boss complain that this Indian manager was incomprehensible. It’s just a mess all around.
I’m Dutch myself and these languages courses have benefited me a lot to remove some of my Dutch accent, which helps during business conversations. I’ve traveled the world pretty much constantly over the past 12 years, so I’m quite tolerant of many types of accents, but even just arriving in the Philippines for the first time last week required some recalibration, because they have their own way of pronouncing things.
If you are in the Phillipines, you might notice that English is an official language of the Phillipines - unlike Spain, France, Russia, Poland, Thailand, or Germany (or the Netherlands). This means that the Filipino English accent is just as much a native accent as the Scottish, Canadian, or American, Indian, Australian, etc. accents. And yet, no one is requiring people from London to change the way they speak their language, even if it's sometimes hard to understand for people from NYC.
You know that people studying a second language often study native pronunciation, right? Thats just standard curricula for language acquisition. Youre fishing for racism where theres none.
English is one of the two official languages of the Philippines, so their English accent is native, just as much as the English accent, Scottish accent, American accent, NYC accent, etc.
There's definitely racism in a global apartheid.
I understand the words you are saying, but struggling to make sense of what you are trying to say. We're talking in this thread about learning a native accent in a second language. I do the same when I am learning Hungarian, as the phonemes are different than what I am used to in my native tongues.