The colloquial language barrier

I knew when I decided to start interviewing for positions in another country that I would be facing some problems with the interview process. I mean, most Americans can't speak English correctly; some days I don't know why the rest of the world even tries. I'm not trying to make a comment about the poor quality of most foreigners' English, but rather, I wonder why the world has to operate in one of the most difficult languages to learn. Let's ignore the fact that the United States is the keeper of international order for just one second. Is it too late to change the official language of our country to something a little easier to teach...like sign language?

I'd like to think that my English isn't the worst in the world, however, in interviewing with people whose first language is not English, you start to notice some of the idioms and phrases you use that probably aren't recognizable to someone who hasn't grown up in the U.S. I just now really realized that I have the tendency to shorten my "to a" to "ta". I say "ya" when I mean "yes". And while I haven't noticed anything in my speech in particular, I know there are plenty of people who interject every other phrase with "like". I'm not just talking about young people either. I had a teacher who would say "um" at least 400 times per class (believe me, we counted). And I'm not even going to get into the accents that people in this country have, some of which make them completely unintelligible to almost everyone else.

After my interview today, the man who I was speaking to stopped and asked me where I was from, because apparently of all the people he had interviewed for the position, I was the most well enunciated of the lot. Apparently my "ta"s and occasional "um"s weren't enough to keep me from getting my meaning across. I just wonder about all those other people that poor man had to try to decipher before me....