Honing mind-reading skills

Talking with Malaysians is a continuous practice of "They said this, but what do they actually mean?" The French don't practise this; they take what you say as what you mean. This sometimes causes problems when non-native speakers make grammatical mistakes; the French will interpret it as what was actually said.

So often I have to think about what people "might mean" when they say something, instead of just taking what they say at face value. Sigh....

But then the French have one disadvantage - I may have mentioned this incident before, but I'll just go through it again: Once our teacher was explaining to us what the "middle ages" were. After her explanation, my classmate said "I think the middle ages were the age of the dinosaurs." Of course, he meant to say "I thought", but the verb was wrongly conjugated in French. From his intonation, we could tell what he meant, but the teacher took what he said at face value and assumed he was contradicting her, so she explained the whole thing again about what the middle ages were. And he said, okay, okay, I think the middle ages were the age of the dinosaurs (again, he meant "I thought"). And so it went, a few times....

(This slightly rambling neither-here-nor-there post is brought to you by frustration of having to decode too many unclear communications at work.)