regardless of the number of mistakes

Last month I introduced to you Danijela from Slovenia, who works abroad and uses English as her primary means of communication. In the frames of an informal interview, she shared her experiences as a foreigner, pointing out some difficulties in communication but overall painting a very positive picture of working and living abroad. Her farewell message was clearly an encouragement for everyone who is considering to try their luck far from their home town. 

As our second TEA guest, I brought you Bori from Hungary, who has been an enthusiastic traveler, tasting life in Switzerland, the United States, and currently in Germany.

Welcome, Bori. Thanks for joining us.

Sure, I live for tea! 

Great, same here! Could you share with the community why you decided to leave your country?

I was always a big fan of travelling around the world. It makes you become a lot opener to different cultures and people. I was offered a position within the company at a different location. Needless to say, I've jumped on the opportunity and started planning my new life in Frankfurt.

How do you feel as an expat?

GOOD! Lots of new experience and challenge to be faced, I'm enjoying them so far.

What languages do you use in your every day life?

I'd say 55 % English, 25 % German, 17 % Hungarian and 3% French.

Wow, quite many! I guess, after this, you would say language is not a barrier and you manage to communicate with the locals.

As a matter of fact: NO. And I don't really mean the situations when you just want the hairdresser to understand what haircut you fancy (though you could end up having an unexpected look :-) or you want to order a pizza (the worst thing that could happen to you is that you receive a Hawaii instead of a Pomodoro. :-). I mean more those cases when you have to break the walls and get closer to a person - language can be a very tough barrier.  Let me just come up with an example that happened to me recently. Our company has bought a smaller German software company. I'm working on their integration project where we're trying to set up their processes in our system. I had several meetings with different combinations of people - a key factor to be mentioned here: the language of the meetings was English. I'm not saying that we could not get anywhere but it was really hard to progress on the open questions. For some reason I had to arrange a separate meeting with the same individuals from the acquired company, only me and them. I told them that I'm happy to go with German, though I can't guarantee that I'll be super perfect in their language. From this point on, the doors were open, we went through all the questions quickly and the people were amazingly happy to share their issues and ideas. Using German was a real Ice-Breaker and made me able to build up very good connections to these people. 

So this means that Germans don't really like to speak English, even if it doesn't mean they don't speak. What advice would you give to someone considering to live abroad?

The first thing coming to my mind if you talk about foreign languages is that you have to make sure you're not shy and you do try to use the language regardless of the number of mistakes. Being shy and counting the failures and the things you don't know in a foreign language can discourage you from improving your skills. And at the same time: don't forget to take your passport, you never know in what country you end up the next day :-)

Thank you, Bori. We wish you a pleasant flight!