I’m willing to bet that neither Trump nor Vance would be able to hold an ordinary conversation in a foreign language, yet they submitted Zelensky to a gruelling linguistic ordeal.
Zelensky’s command of spoken English is commendable on the whole, but can be hesitant when unscripted and at times does not allow him to carry certain nuances of meaning and perform certain pragmatic functions.
One element is that it visibly (and understandably) takes Zelensky more time than Vance or Trump to form sentences in English, which the duo take massive advantage of to drown him in their diatribes.
@f_moncomble do you think that an interpretor would help slow down the flow of the conversation in this situation ? Or would they simply ignore that and diatribe even more ?
@just_chill Good question, I think it would have made it even easier for them to monopolize discourse. Here they didn’t let him finish his sentences. They wouldn’t even have let him start.
@f_moncomble Still an interesting line of thought, I did wonder about it as well. European are so used to speak english all the time they may not be aware that it puts them at a disadvantage against an ill-intentioned native speaker.
