Using English on TBBS
- Thread starter Kestra
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My native language is Finnish. My written English is better than my spoken English. I spoke English fluently even before I joined TBBS, but I have learned a few words from here. I don't use English much in real life aside from my (unnecessary) English lessons.
I don't find speaking English strange at all. In fact, I occasionally think in English. Speaking English is something that has become as natural to me as speaking Finnish.
I first started learning English at school. My skills improved when I began watching some Star Trek DVDs with English subtitles because Finnish subtitles weren't available. Then I started visiting more and more websites in English, including TBBS. As a result of me using lots of English in my spare time, my skills actually rival my teacher's.
I don't find speaking English strange at all. In fact, I occasionally think in English. Speaking English is something that has become as natural to me as speaking Finnish.
I first started learning English at school. My skills improved when I began watching some Star Trek DVDs with English subtitles because Finnish subtitles weren't available. Then I started visiting more and more websites in English, including TBBS. As a result of me using lots of English in my spare time, my skills actually rival my teacher's.
Well, that sort of figures. Does Italian have a word that’s the equivalent of “anal”? (Not in the literal sense, obviously.)[I was always amused by the fact that there is no real equivalent in Italian of “self-conscious”, and no equivalent in English of “disinvolto” (which translates as casual, relaxed, self-confident and uninhibited, all at the same time).
Do you know Otto Waalkes' comedy routine about German-English translations - like "I am hungry - Ich bin Ungar. I am thirsty - Ich bin Donnerstag."?
I used to love that as a teenager, don't know if it would seem quite as funny now.
Is it strange to "speak" in English to others here on such a frequent basis?
--> On a forum, no. Actually I like English speaking boards better, because here I can train my English a bit...at least in writing and reading. Enjoy it.
Were you very fluent in it before joining TBBS, do you use it frequently in RL?
--> No. Still am not fluent. I don´t use English at all in real life. Well..I try reading books in English and watch DVDs in English and sometimes I talk to myself in English *L*, but a real person to converse in English with is not really around. Have one friends who is fluent in English, because she lived for 7 or 8 years in the USA and if I´d ask, she would talk English to me, but I feel rather ashamed speaking English.
Though I guess thats mostly because of missing self-confidence and starting to get too excited and then muddling up the words and getting the grammar all wrong. Always failed my English classes in school and felt sick just thinking about going to that lessons, due to an english teacher who found it great shouting at me in English in front of the whole class, making me feel absolutly stupid and worthless and not capabale ever understanding and speaking English. That was many many years ago, but it burned itself deeply inside my mind and from that point on I hated English and refused to learn it at all.
Took years to start to like the language again...now I like it and want to be fluent in it...and will some day, though I may be a bit late achieving that and slower than others to reach that goal. Don´t care, one day I want to be able to use it at least nearly as well as my native language.
Are there ever times where it is difficult or you really wish everyone spoke a different language?
--> Sure there are times where I find it difficult to understand things, especially when people talk some sort of slang or about topics, that require a very advanced English or when they do jokes. However I am glad here are so many English native speakers and also the others who do not have English as a first language seem to me very very very advanced... lets me learn things.
TerokNor
--> On a forum, no. Actually I like English speaking boards better, because here I can train my English a bit...at least in writing and reading. Enjoy it.
Were you very fluent in it before joining TBBS, do you use it frequently in RL?
--> No. Still am not fluent. I don´t use English at all in real life. Well..I try reading books in English and watch DVDs in English and sometimes I talk to myself in English *L*, but a real person to converse in English with is not really around. Have one friends who is fluent in English, because she lived for 7 or 8 years in the USA and if I´d ask, she would talk English to me, but I feel rather ashamed speaking English.
Though I guess thats mostly because of missing self-confidence and starting to get too excited and then muddling up the words and getting the grammar all wrong. Always failed my English classes in school and felt sick just thinking about going to that lessons, due to an english teacher who found it great shouting at me in English in front of the whole class, making me feel absolutly stupid and worthless and not capabale ever understanding and speaking English. That was many many years ago, but it burned itself deeply inside my mind and from that point on I hated English and refused to learn it at all.
Took years to start to like the language again...now I like it and want to be fluent in it...and will some day, though I may be a bit late achieving that and slower than others to reach that goal. Don´t care, one day I want to be able to use it at least nearly as well as my native language.
Are there ever times where it is difficult or you really wish everyone spoke a different language?
--> Sure there are times where I find it difficult to understand things, especially when people talk some sort of slang or about topics, that require a very advanced English or when they do jokes. However I am glad here are so many English native speakers and also the others who do not have English as a first language seem to me very very very advanced... lets me learn things.
TerokNor
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The semi-literate posters are a tiny minority here, despite what some posters have said in this thread. It's an excellent place to broaden your vocabulary, provided you don't go into TNZ.
It's a testament to the non-native English speakers here that it's often very difficult to tell that it's not their first language. Mutenroshi and Iguana are especially impressive.
It's a testament to the non-native English speakers here that it's often very difficult to tell that it's not their first language. Mutenroshi and Iguana are especially impressive.
Do you know Otto Waalkes' comedy routine about German-English translations - like "I am hungry - Ich bin Ungar. I am thirsty - Ich bin Donnerstag."?
Is there anyone who doesn't, really? The only comedy that seemed to exist in the 80s was Otto. Hard times. At the time, I also thought it was funny. I'm not sure how I'd feel about it today. My guess is that I wouldn't find it as funny because there's a lot of stuff from the 90s (Wochenshow, Schmidteinander, Harald Schmidt) that I don't find half as funny anymore. Basically, only Kalkofes Mattscheibe has stood the test of time.
I'd say especially there. I learned a lot of useful expressions there.
Hey, and I'm not??
I kid, I kid.
My first language is Dutch, but when I was only a young teenager I started reading (under the impulses of my Anglomaniac grandfather) in English - tv helps as well.
So when I first joined the WWW I was already fluent enough in English that it didn't pose many problems.
After that, all major textbooks at university are in English.
My previous job was at the Brussels office of a big American company so all "official" conversation was in English. It's the same at my current job, everything gets done in English. The staff is also very multinational and multicultural so English really is required.
Yeah, actually I learned a new term here today. In the 14$ entry to the US thread someone mentioned that he worked as a busboy, and I had no idea what that means, so I looked it up.
Yeah, I didn't know that dude was from Italy for a while.
As topics turn more technical, it sometimes becomes very clear that English is not the other speaker's first language. But it's damn close enough, and I thank Mothra every day that English is the One World Language. Otherwise I'd never get to talk to foreigners, as I lack the drive to really learn another language, and I'd be far poorer for their voices' absence.
Sam I Am said:
Being a student of French, I know that I speak better French on the forum than in... okay, I'm pretty sure my translation of the last part is wrong.
Thanks to the similarities, I can read French pretty well (to the point of being able to read a newspaper with only a few difficulties), but actually having a conversation in it is well outside my reach. Which is disappointing, since I worked with quite a few French people during my PhD. But I hardly had time to sleep, let alone to learn another language.
Después de haber estudiado un poco de español, me gustaría que más gente de aquí lo hablan. Pero creo que Star Trek no es muy popular en España y América Latina.
Después de haber estudiado un poco de español, me gustaría que más gente de aquí lo hablan. Pero creo que Star Trek no es muy popular en España y América Latina.
^This may sound stupid to Romance language speakers, but I think one of the really great things about English (and Russian) is the lack of accent marks on letters. If you want to write something, you just write it.
Look at all those unnecessary squiggly things. I know how to say Espana, I don't need an estimated value of the "n." I guess it's one of those things you pick up when your native tongue does dumb things like spell an f sound with a gh... sometimes. The thought process is probably semi-ideogrammatic.
Look at all those unnecessary squiggly things. I know how to say Espana, I don't need an estimated value of the "n." I guess it's one of those things you pick up when your native tongue does dumb things like spell an f sound with a gh... sometimes. The thought process is probably semi-ideogrammatic.
Spanish doesn't really do that. The accents just tell you which syllable to emphasise when you pronounce it. And the ñ just is a different letter than n, like ö ü, ä and ß in German.
Aw, I guess so.
I suppose it's the same in Russian, then. They have three different e's. Well, one looks like an e, but it ain't an e.
For a musical, I thought it had a decent point about class distinctions and language in the UK. But that's not really important.
Sometimes I'd love this board to be a polyglot board. I've thought about replying in other languages to posters of those languages. But, aside from being a dick to anyone who can't read it, it also just highlights my extraordinarily limited knowledge of French and the flaws in my Italian as well.
Non sarebbe uguale perché capisci latino e nessun altro sa la lingua (perché è una lingua morta).
ETA: Potrei dire "lingua mortissima"?
I see your point, but to me the little inconvenience of using diacritics is vastly surpassed by the most useful feature of having different phonemes represented by different signs. The two sounds "n" and "ñ" are very different, so it makes no sense in my mind to have only one sign to represent them (in Italian the sound "ñ" is represented by the digraph "gn").
Also, as Roger mentioned, they work as a guide to how you stress syllables. Sometimes, identical words with different accents mean very different things, like "pero" (pear tree) and "però" (but, however).
In a perfect world, I would love a language where every single phoneme is represented by a different sign (kinda like the International Phonetic Alphabet, but without going to its extremes). English, with its almost complete disconnect between what is written and what is said drives me crazy sometimes.
Latin might be a dead language but, speaking from an European point of view, its influence on European languages is so strong that it will be easy to pick up with a bit of study. Personally, I'm a fan of Latino sine flexione, a simplified form of Latin which nonetheless keeps all the richness in vocabulary and the cultural influence. Also, it's terribly similar to Italian.
On the other hand, those accent marks have a purpose. You can tell how a word is pronounced just by looking at it (for the most part, anyway). You can also figure out how a word is spelled by hearing it, to some degree.
A lot of people learning English struggle enormously with its rather arbitrary spelling and pronunciation rules. Generally, in English, you can't tell how a word is pronounced from looking at it. After a while, this ceases to be a problem for the often used words but, e.g., I never would have guessed the correct pronunciation of byzantine.
Yes, ё - yo. It's often printed like a normal e to confuse foreigners, I suppose. Or did you mean з?
Anyway, you haven't seen anything in that regard until you've realised that in Greek, there are about 7 different ways to create i.
I'd love to have a French corner, too, so I could practise my very rusty French.
Latin might be a dead language but, speaking from an European point of view, its influence on European languages is so strong that it will be easy to pick up with a bit of study. Personally, I'm a fan of Latino sine flexione, a simplified form of Latin which nonetheless keeps all the richness in vocabulary and the cultural influence. Also, it's terribly similar to Italian.
Also, in some countries, it's still rather common to learn Latin in higher school education. For example, I studied it for 5 years. But it's mainly confined to translating from Latin so constructing a sentence would still be a serious challenge to me. However, I really like the idea.
One of my Ancient History profs once told us that he was at an international conference where a number of participants didn't speak English and so it was agreed (spontaneously) to hold the conference in Latin.
Not really that strange to me, but then again I've been fluent in English since I was like 12. So quite fluent before joining here, use it quite a bit IRL, and it's seldom that it's difficult.
Well, it's difficult I guess that a lot of my countrymen have such terrible accents when speaking English.
Well, it's difficult I guess that a lot of my countrymen have such terrible accents when speaking English.
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