zlacker

>>femfos+(OP)
I'm a bit sad about how eager everyone is jumping on the idea that "candid advice" will always be construed as possibly sexist. I'm from Germany and we are famously blunt, so maybe there is a cultural aspect to this, but to me candor != risk of sexism. If your advice is candid, it also shouldn't leave any ambiguity..."I'm unsure about you doing the pitch because the last N times you froze up and you seem nervous again" makes your reasoning clear without beating around the bush. How can you twist this into something sexist?

>>igorkr+5i
A lot of Americans of any gender would be put off by a lot of very routine and candid professional communications that happen in Germany. I find American English in general to be tending toward the near universal avoidance of direct speech and statements, independent of speaker/listener identity.

Importantly the speaker and listener are not consciously aware of this happening. The net result is that you can say literal/plain thing A and the listener can hear literal/plain thing B.

Speaking to Americans requires a significantly accurate modeling of the listener's mind and expectations to be able to be clearly understood, much much moreso than any other language I have studied or even heard of.

Basically, it is very easy to be totally misunderstood when using plain, literal speech (such as is common in Germany or in Slavic countries).

I've written about it: https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/

>>sneak+sJ
Thank you for writing that article. I'm a native English speaker and I intend to speaker clearer because I read this.