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Showing posts from September, 2013

Observation (1) - the use of language.

Just listening to interviews of very high-profile managers and business men/women in my home country, I noticed their uses of language is not always good, sometimes it's hard to follow and rather ambiguous. The main characteristics of those people's speaking are: The idea is vague covered ambiguous words. Listener sometime must deduce what is being spoke. Redundant words are omnipresent.  The sentence tends to be long.  The overall information is low. Sometime it's waste of time to listening to interviews/speakings without much information. I realize that to reduce my wasteful time spent on speaking non-sense things in your future, I should take time to study carefully my mother tongue.

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Just want to write down something to capture my confusing thoughts.

Language skill and the success of startup

Paul Graham just posted another post stressing the importance of verbal skill.  http://paulgraham.com/accents.html In his post, he wrote about the correlation between the founder's accent and the low success ratio of startups. He found that the stronger the founder's accent is, the harder other people will understand what he tries to say and therefore his startup will be more difficult to succeed.  The founder is always selling to customers, partners, investors and even his employees. The founder's work is to encounter as many people as possible and persuade them to buy his products or ideas. When people meet him the first time, they just think him as normal person they meet everyday. They aren't going to understand him, unless he uses an understandable English. Therefore the founder must be the person who can communicate well in English.