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I'm sure at some point, you've been frustrated by someone who needs a whole paragraph to get one simple point across. That's why I love to talk with people who's first language isn't English. Non-native speakers don't have much to work with, so they don't fuss around with the words they know.

The expats in Shanghai are the best examples, many of them being French and Italian. When they speak English, they are blunt - 'I don't like this.' 'What do you want?' 'Please.' 'No.'

It's exactly how I sound when I'm interviewing a local forex trader in Chinese. I'm fine speaking to my family and friends in Chinese, but I can't get a hang of all the jargon about liquidity, currency swaps, this and that. I've completely scrapped the need to ask questions elegantly or set a scene for the interview.  'What's the yuan doing? Why. Wait, whyyy?'  Sorry, trader-on-the-other-side-of-the-phone-line. Maybe you too can appreciate my bluntness!

I am reminded of how refreshing it is to be as simple as possible, after reading The New Yorker's interview with author Jhumpa Lahiri. Already one of the masters of creative writing English, Lahiri recently started learning and writing in Italian. She says that she would only have three words her new language to describe the sky versus twenty-five in English, but that she finds a "strange purity" to this limitation. Lahiri also describes writing imperfectly in Italian as "freedom."

"I feel what I felt as a child, when I was first learning how to write stories, when I was first writing stories, and I was first experiencing that pleasure of putting sentences on paper and the excitement that it would give me," she says.

"How I explain it to people is that I feel as though I’ve tied my right hand behind my back on purpose and I’m writing with my left hand, and I recognize how much sloppier it is, how much more awkward it is, how much more out of control it is in a way. But I also love doing without so much."

a moment from 1997