Who can speak fastest in English among the non-native speakers?
Did you meet anyone who’s not an English native speaker but can speak even faster than locals? From my experience, Indians who I met generally speak fluently and fast. No matter who I met, as long as that person was an Indian, she/he would own excellent English abilities, including my previous colleague, phone service personnel, and my classmate, so people frequently mistake them for English natives. People could hardly expect that an Indian has terrible English skills. This phenomenon often makes me wonder why Indian people ordinarily speak so fast in English, and even if it is not an official language in their nation?
To answer this question, I assume it might be because:
- Their English educational system is efficient and appropriate.
- Their mother languages are similar to English.
- The British government had colonized India for a long time, so they might remain plenty of English related stuff (is uncountable) in tradition.
- There are too many citizens in India; thus, they need to be competitive in different aspects, not only English.
- They are born with language genes not to need to put much effort into learning it.
- Indians pay a lot of invisible efforts day and night and sleep merely 4 hours a day to study, but they pretend it’s as easy as blowing off dust.
I extremely envy Indian students who can speak so fast. Therefore, I sometimes attempted to emulate their speed, but it’s a bit hard because my personality and cultural background tend to be slower and laid-back. However, their incredible English skills are typically accompanied by strong accents and unclear intonation, which easily cause misunderstanding by other non-native speakers. I guess their mother language influences this. Nonetheless, international students or workers have many opportunities to collaborate with Indian colleagues; therefore, it is another challenge for them to comprehend Indian- fast but not clear sentences.
Nevertheless, everything boils down to technology. The good news is now we have plenty of tools to translate Indians’ “combined” English, such as google translate. I found some websites with English precisely pronounced in Indian accents. It is anticipated that these kinds of advanced inventions can help the communications become much more effective between Indians and other non-native speakers.