Am I the only one that needs to "tune" to new people and their voice before I can fully understand what they are saying?
I am fluent at English, live and work in an English speaking country and environment. I'm not as good with the language as the average native and probably will never be, and I'm fine with this.
What I'm bothered by is, whenever I meet someone new, I need to sample a lot of conversation before their own accent and rythm etc. become familiar enough for me to understand them perfectly. It's bothering me because it is a huge obstacle when meeting new people, or at parties, where there is background noise or the person has an accent I'm not used to. And in turn, I feel I can't give the best impression on meeting them especially since I'm already a bit challenged with this (introversion, a bit of social anxiety...)
It's not the end of the world, but it is very frustrating with some examples in mind :
Awkward business meetings over calls/skype where everyone undertand each other and I'm just lost, I ask for them to repeat at first then when I'm obviously impeding the progress and we're running out of time I just end up trying to figure out what I'm hearing and end up pretty much useless in that meeting. One day this might cost me a promotion over someone else.
Or when dating, meeting my date's friends, and I just can't make it work and it's just awkward. You could say that this doesn't matter for some people (no need to impress friends to have a successful relationship), however in our day and age dating goes so fast and we have so many options that I feel this has played against me in the past.
Do you have similar experiences? What do you think can be done to attenuate this issue? I have been living in an English speaking country for 5 years now, and I don't see any improvement...
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