Thread: Greetings from Siberia

Hello everyone. Nice to meet you all.
First of all, I'd like to say this forum is a great site. Though being primarily about Russian language, it is extremely useful for learning English too. I've spent several hours reading discussions on various grammar topics here and found a lot of helpful information for myself.

My name is Vadim. I am Russian and I live in Siberia. I am a software developer, so my English experience is mostly about "how to fix this and how to implement that".
When I studied at an university, I was fond of English. There was no internet available at the time, so that was an "academic interest" only without any chance to get live English experience. Being a software developer now I speak English almost every day, but the problem is that in such specific area the language is something like a geek slang, not proper American or British English.
So I'm interested in communicating with native English speakers on any topics to advance my language skills. Hope I can be helpful for your studying of Russian as well.

I'm interested in other languages too. Specifically, Turkish, German and constructed language Lojban. Though for now I am not able to spend much time on them. Hopefully, I'll deal with them in the future.

Спасибо за хорошую оценку форума!
Добро пожаловать!

Hello

Let me know when you wanna learn Turkish. I'm a native speaker of Turkish.

Hi Vadim! Lojban, lol - yes you are a geek then, aren't you !
I think I may be similar age to you, about..... and I also work in IT (project manager, but I have been a programmer in the past).

Your English in your post above is very good. If you write this without thinking too much about what you wrote, then you have nothing to worry about.

The thing to remember about IT is that most IT people, even in English speaking countries are not actually native English speakers. I live in London, but I am Swedish. My almost unnoticeable accent does more good than harm. That's the way to approach English in IT.

A lot of people I work with right here in the UK are Indian, some of African background. In the past I have worked with "outsourced" and other foreign colleagues across all of the EU and in Israel, Ukraine, Malaysia. So anything goes.... As long as people understand what you are saying, and you can understand what people are saying to you, then there is no problem.

And many IT people who ARE native English speakers are useless at grammar and spelling. Without bragging, I am almost invariably better at writing in English than native English speakers in my teams (programmers). I don't know why, but it's definitely possible to have a university degree in the UK and still have lousy grammar and spelling. It's the norm rather than the exception in IT. My impression is that the situation is no different in the USA.

For a management job you need to be able to communicate well in English though, not accidentally say something rude, and handle the "niceties". So if that's where your ambitions lie, then you are right to really make an effort. However, if you can speak like you write you are making great progress.

The style and way of speaking (not just accent) varies quite a bit between Brits and American. So depending on which country you work more with or relate better to, you might want to focus on that way of speaking, and not the other. I recommend British English, of course!
However American English and the way that Americans express themselves in general, and behave at work, is quite different to the UK, so if that's your main point of contact with the English speaking world, then you might want to tap into the US way of speaking English.