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

[ikusatami.livejournal.com]

wow that's really a wide variety of people you have there.. xD

I improved my english with.. yes.. the internet mainly <XD, reading fanfics in english, even attempting to translate them.. and videogames. a lot of companies don't even bother translating the games in german. but right now I play them in english even if there is a german option *lol* (helps with the faqs on gamefaqs.com XD) and I read english books :D only a few but.. Harry Potter series of course ^_^" Howl's Moving Castle.. and.. maybe you know this series.. it's by Laura Joh Rowland (or whatever she is called) and it's about Sano Ichirou, something like a detective working for the Shogun, dealing with murders that occured around the shogun.. and stuff. *babble babble*

[yuki-scorpio.livejournal.com]

So it's more reading/writing than speaking/listening? Because I remember meeting up with friends from flist who have very good written English but weren't very confident with speaking it.

I've heard of all those! Tried HP, couldn't get into it (I must be a rare case). I like to read, too, but am not doing it as much as I should. I think the last time I really got into a (series of) book is George RR Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire". :DDDD

[chinawolf.livejournal.com]

I did study English at school for seven years, but that's not actually how it became good (it wasn't even my first foreign language and I only started at age 13). The main contributing factor for me was/is reading and more recently the internet, but I've also spent a total of two years living overseas, mostly speaking English even when the country I was in had a different main language.

I feel a little stuck in my English development, though. I would love for it to get better, to have someone correct my mistakes and improve especially my spoken English. I'm at a stage when this is hard work by myself because my speech and written patterns are ingrained so deeply and usually, I don't even see my mistakes any more.

[yuki-scorpio.livejournal.com]

I'm in the same situation! Sometimes my mistakes (with spoken English) is because I speak too fast and not think first, but with written words, I'm so used to the way I write that I don't see my mistakes... probably the only way to get out of this is to read more and read more widely...

(In any case, I think your English > my English, even though I've spent so much time in an English country...)

[chinawolf.livejournal.com]

If you're looking for specifics: Three years of English at school, followed by a vacation in Australia when I ran out of books to read and bought Jurassic Park and a couple of Grisham novels (back then, they weren't horrible yet). I then went back to school and found that those five or six books had dramatically improved my English, it appeared I had made a leap of some kind. I was fifteen at the time, and from then on, had my mother bring me books from the U.S./India, which were much cheaper than German books anyway, and by the time I went for my High School semester in Toledo, Ohio, a year later, reading English books was second nature and I've never stopped (to the point where I don't read any German books unless the original language is German). After my semester in the U.S., I had another two and a half years of English classes at school, and the went on to live in Spain/U.S./China for bits at the time over the next four years, mostly speaking English to room- and flatmates. Hence, my English only improved in proportion to how good the books I was reading were and how well the people I was talking to spoke English/American.

My spoken English is so much worse than my written English it makes me want to hide in shame. I like speaking English better than I do German because I feel more confident when speaking English, but I still have difficulties when choosing words (this seems to be a universal problem in the speech centre of my brain rather than connected to any particular language). Thus, my vocabulary is very limited because rather than wait for the perfect sentence to form in my head and look like an idiot because it takes me longer to speak than other people, I just start circumscribing what I want to say in the words that jump to mind fastest. Actually, when I put it like that, it makes me think I should see a speech therapist. >_>

[chinawolf.livejournal.com]

Not so! In the very least your spoken English pwns mine ten to nothing!! :P I also think you make way less mistakes than I do, it's just that I obsess about proof-reading emails/posts/comments before I send them, so I catch most of the mistakes I make. I have spell checks for everything, in Semagic, in Thunderbird, and even on Firefox. For example, in this comment as a whole, the words 'pwns', 'Semagic', 'Thunderbird' and 'Firefox' get underlined in red. >_>

Yeah, overall I guess reading more than fanfic is the key? *glares at self*

[celen.livejournal.com]

Hee, for me, it's probably through fandom that I've learned most of my English words. I mean, it's hard not to learn anything when you read fics, watch anime, read manga, other English books and talk to friends in English, right? ;D But it's true that most people are better at writing that speaking, myself included. It's the lack of practise, of course - we don't have many exchange students or anyone here to talk to.

Of course, the school system in Finland is pretty good, too, so that's why we keep learning new things and grammar and all.

By the way, are you native speaker or from some other country and just live in UK? I realized I actually don't know. D:

[yuki-scorpio.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I tend to just hit tab+enter very quickly after I've typed something! XD And then I spot the mistakes and edit the post...

English and me never really clicked until about 3 years after I moved here. I think it was reading a lot that did the change, as well. I don't understand why you say you're more confident speaking in English than German, though... it doesn't seem logical...?

You have no idea how many problems I get with vocab. giving_ground'd been staying with me for a while and I kept asking her all these questions when I was writing fic. Finding the right word for what I want to say is very difficult sometims x_x

Your way is better, though, compared with how I just blab things out and then go "sdfafhsfsa" at myself afterwards!

[yuki-scorpio.livejournal.com]

Ee! You're from Finland also! That makes two of you on my friends list :D (one day I should draw a pie-chart!)

It's surprising how far one can get even outside an English-speaking environment. I had no idea your native tongue isn't English, for one. XD I'm from Hong Kong, but I've lived in the UK for very many years now. My Chinese and English are equally bad, both sort of half way there. It's very frustrating!

[mushrooms.livejournal.com]

I call myself Chinese, yeah, but I'm not exactly the best in it. Conversant and stuff, but not GOOD. XDDD I've always and probably always will say English is my first language. =D

[sweetchycks.livejournal.com]

i am chinese but i was born in the states and had many non asian friends when i was growing up so my english was good but i still had to take english as second language just in case.

[celen.livejournal.com]

Heh, yep! Finland is a nice country to live. ♥ (Awwww.)

Mm-hm, true. And honestly, you didn't? That's...kinda amazing. I was sure you'd have noticed the fact I'm no native speaker, because there are moments when I just can't remember the words or grammatic stuff or something else. Well, you'll notice that in the end of this month, because I'm not a fluent speaker, sadly so.

From Hong Kong? Ohh, that makes sense! I mean, I saw a pic of you somewhere around your journal and I thought you didn't look like European and I just thought that maybe you have Asian blood (like, the other of your parents would be Asian etc).

AND! Don't say your English is bad, because it is not. You sound exactly like a native speaker, I honestly thought you're originally from UK. :3

[yuki-scorpio.livejournal.com]

So do you mostly speak in Chinese or English? O_o

[mushrooms.livejournal.com]

English. =D My parents and grandfather converse in Cantonese a lot, though, and I curse in almost anything that comes to mind, whether it makes sense or not. 8D

[factorielle.livejournal.com]

I learned english because at the time Internet was almost exclusively in english and I was craving Animorphs spoilers.

And then I had a kind-of fight with the at-the-time head of french!boiporn, and moved on to English fandom where she didn't make the rules. XD

[yuki-scorpio.livejournal.com]

dsjfhklsafhj XDDDD best reason ever!

............there was a head of boi!porn? XDDDDD

(nice icon ♥)

[factorielle.livejournal.com]

I was twelve, dude. XD

Well, she had one of the first website for French FF8 porn. And Lancedragon. And then it became a fic archive, and there was a mailing list and stuffus. I think she kick-started a great number of fangirls. XD So at the time, her word was Law.

(I love it)

[factorielle.livejournal.com]

In english it would be Dragonlance. DUH.

[grimmjow-jagger.livejournal.com]

As for me, I just lived in the states for quite some time and then kept studying English as a second language back here in Russia, first at school and then at a linguistic university.
But if it weren't for online rambling and reading books/watching movies in English I'd definately forget the language, since don't think our education system is efficient enough...

And I still make a hella lot of typos.

[xiu]

English is my first language, and I still suck at it XD; I get too many words confused and growing up in a place where most of the people I know... actually don't speak English fluently, or at least with really thick accents and still insert random words from their first language left me kind of like... "Buh??". XD (Reason I tend to use random British spelling? I lived with an Australian woman for 3 years when I was learning to read/write XD)

But gathering from info above XD; The internet seems to have a lot to do with it, particularly when it comes to fandom. English-speaking fandoms tend to be larger than others and easier to find things in, IMO.

If you actually listen to me speak for longer than 10 minutes, I start going off with random German or Spanish (neither of which I speak fluently. XD)

[yuki-scorpio.livejournal.com]

XDDDDD "Buh?" is a good word, though!

There should totally be just one type of English, to make things easier. Everyone should just speak British English XD (coz that's the one I know :DDDDDDDD)

I'll... probably just stare at you blankly and nod. Chances are I wouldn't have realised you spoke German or Spanish, and just thought you used an English word I didn't know. XDDDD

[yuki-scorpio.livejournal.com]

...........I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW YOU'RE RUSSIAN.

I have this impression that most Russians don't know much English... probably because they always comment in Russian in LJ news posts, and have their own fandom pages. I've also been asked if they could translate my fics into Russian, which led me to believe not many of them could read English........>_>"""""

[yuki-scorpio.livejournal.com]

12 when you wanted the spoilers, or 12 when you sort new areas for boi!porn? XDDDD

[naru-naoe.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... Personally, I'm not good with the internet. I tend to not proof read when faced with a comment box like this, or a forum on some other case. I'm more confident, coherent and correct (grammar wise) writing on paper or on MS Word (but typing in Word is cheating). ESL is as a whole pretty strict. So I can attribute my english to three things. School. Country. Home. Country because that's what the Department of Education is saying and is trying to forward. School because they gave me my grammar while I found my style. Home because it gave me my ground basics and even practice ground.

Reading books and fanfiction normally would have helped except I became half a geek in high school, the other half a push-over (No quality reading time there) and most fanfiction in FF.net weren't really exemplars of good grammar by then.

But I had a conversation with another author once whom I, while I was at least a little bit younger but I think very rude, commented errors in writing on. Believe me when I say it was meant to be constructive criticism. Glad to say she took it that way. She said most of what I said were stylistic arguments. Snipped it away as nothing much but noted it for further reference seeing that I may have been enforced stricter rules since I'm ESL and she wasn't.

[factorielle.livejournal.com]

12 when I wanted the spoilers.

For the pr0n, about 15?