Via the Universal Language blog, an article in Newhouse News Service entitled ‘English is Language of Business, but Americans Aren’t Fluent’.

bq. On a flight from Tokyo to Bangkok, an Indonesian woman speaking fractured English couldn’t make herself understood to an American flight attendant.
But a Japanese passenger could tell what the Indonesian woman was saying.

One should avoid words with several meanings when speaking international English, for example check/cheque, right, plant, and also phrasal verbs and idioms.

It sounds to me as if we should all learn a form of pidgin to speed up the process.

This is something I worry about when I see a series of books published in Germany, in English, entitled ‘German law accessible’.