English is my third language and negotiating in it is hard
Posted as second_language_s
- Looking for
- a dominant who checks that I understood, not just that I agreed
- Experience
- Five years, two of them here.
- Around
- east, London
I learned all of this vocabulary in a language I did not grow up in, and there is a gap between understanding a word and knowing what it costs. That gap is the reason for this post.
I am thirty one. I came here from Bucharest three years ago, I work in a hospital laboratory, and my English is good enough that people forget it is not my first language, which is exactly the problem. In a negotiation I will nod. I will say yes because I followed most of the sentence and did not want to interrupt for the rest. Twice that has led somewhere I did not intend, and neither time was anybody being cruel. So what I need is somebody who checks. Who says it a second way. Who asks me to explain back what we agreed rather than accepting a yes. If that sounds tedious, it takes ninety seconds and it makes the difference between a good evening and a week of feeling stupid.
I am not fragile about this and I am not asking to be treated as slow. In my own language I am blunt, funny, and very hard to push around. I would like to reach the point of being that person here too. East London, five years in this, and my experience at home was mostly with people I already knew, which made everything easier in ways I did not appreciate at the time.
The other thing is that I miss the jokes. In my own language I am the funny one and here I am the polite one, and that has been the hardest part of three years, not the paperwork. Written messages are honestly easier for me than the phone.