Not long after having arrived in Germany, I was invited to a dinner party.

I was by far the youngest in the room. I felt inexperienced. And I felt that I didn’t have anything to say that could be of interest to anyone.

When I returned home, I knew that I had to do something about my conversation skills.

I started reading books about communication, having meaningful small talk and big talk and making friends. You’ll see them all on the shelves in my office.

And what I learnt was amazing. If I wanted to be good at talking to people, I just needed to ask lots of questions.

Why did I not think of that before?

People love talking about themselves.

Of course, we don’t want to sound as if we’re interrogating the other person. So we need to ask questions we think s/he will enjoy answering. We need to show real interest and to listen carefully. And we shouldn’t forget to share some of our own life experiences, too.

Give it a try. I’m sure you’ll do fine.

And tell me if it works for you.

Do you work with non-native speakers of English? If so, why spend time learning idioms and difficult grammatical constructions?

Is it not more important for us all to focus on speaking and writing clearly and correctly? We want our listeners to understand us the first time around—without asking us to repeat what we said, don’t we?

That’s why I prefer to use plain language. A language that most people understand the first time they hear it.

So what can we do?

We can:

• use short, clear words whenever possible,
• keep most sentences short,
• avoid jargon and idioms,
• use active rather than passive whenever possible,
• choose to use verbs rather than nouns, and
• avoid abbreviations.

We’ll make fewer mistakes in our communication. And we can still be creative and expressive—and sound well-educated.

I’d love to know what you think about this.