🗣️ English & communication
Remove language as a barrier between you and the offer.
Most candidates who worry about their English are already understandable. What actually costs interviews is hesitation and over-long sentences, and both respond quickly to practice.
The path, in order
Where people lose months
- ⚠Studying grammar instead of speaking. Reading about the language builds recognition; interviews require production, and only speaking practice builds that.
- ⚠Reaching for complicated words. Precise simple language reads as competent; elaborate vocabulary used slightly wrongly reads as the opposite.
- ⚠Apologising for your English at the start. It draws attention to something the interviewer may not have noticed and frames everything after it as a deficit.
Common questions
Will my accent hold me back?
Clarity matters; accent largely does not. Interviewers need to follow you without effort, which is a question of pace, sentence length and pronunciation of key terms — not of sounding like a native speaker.
How do I stop freezing in interviews?
Rehearse out loud rather than in your head, and prepare the four recurring formats — introducing yourself, describing a project, explaining a decision, asking a question. Freezing is usually retrieval failure under pressure, which repetition fixes.
Is written English as important as spoken?
For remote and distributed roles, often more so. Most of how colleagues assess you will arrive as text, so short sentences and clear structure carry real weight.
Put it to work
School-level foundations for this subject live on our sister site Syllab.
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