In which Pez wastes space on your friends list!

[pez]

I was just thinking how many people around here don't actually speak English as their first language. On my flist, I have Chinese (Mainland/HK, and I don't know if Taiwanese and Singaporeans like to call themselves Chinese), Filipino, Brazilian, Portugese, French, German, Norwegian, Finns (is that the right word?), Argentinian, Vietnamese, Indonesian... and others I can't think of right now because I lost some brains through my nose this morning. XD

I know we all mostly write in English because that's the language most understands around here. My question is, how come everyone's English is so good? Is it because you live/lived overseas? You learned it in school and keep practising online? You love reading English books?

Don't mind me, I'm just curious. XD Here, watch Roy dance.

Comments

[yuki-scorpio.livejournal.com]

I had about a year of ESL class, but my teacher was crap!

Regarding the stylistic arguement... I suppose it's a bit like when people start saying "myself" and "yourself" needlessly, and "not to" when they mean "to not" - eg: it's better to not dwell on it vs it's better not to dwell on it. There are a lot of things that are said so often it's become acceptable, although when someone says to me, "yes, I'm fine, thanks. Yourself?" it still makes me want to smack them hard with an English textbook. ^^"

[naru-naoe.livejournal.com]

Oh it was more of a: "hey this is a dangling modifier" vs "no it's emphasis" kind of thing so yeah XD

but no matter I love her work anyway, and she's really nice... uh yeah *shrugs it off*

[yuki-scorpio.livejournal.com]

Ah~ I never learned the proper names of those terms! It's one of those things that make me blink blankly... I know what nouns, verbs and adjectives are, but when people start saying modifiers etc, I just go "........". I think it's because I learned most of my English through just day-to-day living and reading novels.