That aside, what I wanted to touch on in this post, is languages. So many of them, so little time to devote to learning them all.
I pride myself on having a good ear for languages. The upside of this is that even if a language is unknown to me, after a few hours of full immersion I am usually able to communicate and understand my peers. It may involve rather a lot of hand gestures and some peculiar pronunciations, but by and large the effort pays off.
The downside is that I often find myself involuntarily
Less so of course if it involves a country where the native language is not English. Then I just morph into a poor version of Alastair McGowan with an Italian accent.
Anyway, at this week's sales conference I have been amazed by the number of colleagues who are conversing fluently in English, when this is not their mother tongue. Regardless of accents, there has been a common denominator, and I salute this. The whole conference could have just as easily been conducted entirely in French. Or German. Or Dutch.
A mere handful of words though have given the presenters a few problems with regard to pronunciation. What were they? Oh, you know. nothing too far-fetched: diarrhea (in place of diary), shit (sheet), and - my favourite - fuckers (focus).
Not bad, all in all.
