| Also a second-language speaker here. It's fine to "hmm". Many highly regarded public speakers "hmm" a lot. If the rest of the sentence makes sense, most listeners will ignore the interruption. The best way to practice is to make conversation with people, but try to use full sentences and complete thoughts, instead of shortened, colloquial expressions. It was very easy to fall into the trap of colloquialism as a second-language speaker, because it's way easier to learn to "Awesome", "Nice, "oh yeah" your way through conversations with friends, which doesn't your spoken English when you need to actually convey something. Another tip is preparation. Prepare full sentences that reflect your current state of mind. "Let me think this through for a second." "I'm going to store the data into a 2D array." "I'm going to loop through this array and do xxx with each item." And also, don't fret too much about it. Interviewers in tech industries are familiar with language barriers. If you feel like you're lost in the middle of a sentence, give a pause and start over. Not a big deal. |