I use this forum as tool for improving my English and I recommend this to all other non-native English speakers.
Emir wrote:
I use this forum as tool for improving my English and I recommend this to all other non-native English speakers.
Maybe this helps.
Also important to state: even if this forum was started by native (or near-native ;) ) speakers of English, they, and all other participants, have shown full tolerance and comprehension for less than perfect English. Full functionality and comprehension can be (and generally are) achieved by
-) readers reading beyond the verbatim of a phrase that at first sight makes no sense
-) posters posting an awkward phrase in their own language and inviting help with translation
So while I can imagine people are reluctant to post in a language they feel inadequate with, they really shouldn’t.
Just as a mental exercise: my own country is multilingual by statute/constitution, and has a convention, applied up to the highest level of government, that in meetings everybody can speak their own language, and everybody is supposed to understand all three national languages. In writing, everything must be published in all three languages. Seems to work, generally. Do the Swiss apply some similar scheme?
@Achimha: made my day! ROTFL!
Think I’ll distribute it at work.
The ratio of content contributors, commenters, and readers has been always about 1:10:100. It’s hard to overcome and makes sense. Contributing exposes one to risk of ridicule, snide comments, cynicism, rhetorical questions.
Sometimes one wishes not having written something, but it can’t be edited anymore. An additional risk.
So why taking a risk?
I started this thread to get useful feedback so I will just answer a couple of points:
ridicule, snide comments, cynicism
If this happens here on EuroGA I would like to see it. It would be extremely uncommon.
but it can’t be edited anymore
It can be edited. There is a 2 hour edit window and we (David and I) will on request always happily edit/remove postings which have issues with legality, embarrassment, etc. The edit window is there for very good reasons and this topic has been discussed here many times, with explanations of how forums can otherwise get trashed.
dublinpilot wrote:
you need to find a different examiner next time!
Easier said than done. The swiss examiner (the only one allowed to award level 6) almost failed a native english speaker I know, and FOCA recently stated they won’t accept foreign level 6…
what_next wrote:
I read and posted as much as I could on English language forums of all kinds just for practice. Writing provides ten times better training than reading, even if the mistakes one makes can be embarrassing at times.
Absolutely true. Writing in the forums is a lovely training ground for people genuinely interested in mastering a language. Write as much as you can and get feedback on it. I sysoped a forum full of Americans for a while and it was the best training I ever got, after I openly encouraged some of the folks who wrote good language to actively point me to recurring mistakes. Two of those folks are close (online) friends now. You can’t learn anything any better than by doing it and getting constructive feedback.
tomjnx wrote:
The swiss examiner (the only one allowed to award level 6) almost failed a native english speaker I know, and FOCA recently stated they won’t accept foreign level 6…
Oh? We must have had the same examiner then? Frankly, I had a ball taking that exam. The examiners were really nice people. I had met one when I did my initial Level 4 (they could not do 6 at the time) and she told me even then that when time came for recurrency I should apply for LVL6.
Native speakers does not really mean they speak proper English or what ever language they are native in. When I went to England first to learn the language, I stayed with a family who were a good example of that. Husband a genuine Cockney, wive from Yorkshire. I wonder how they communicated. My Swiss teacher was not really impressed with some of the expressions I picked up at the time and it took time to get rid of them. LP does not really mean you can swear like a native but you can speak the language in the way it is most universally spoken. Neither is “Platt” equal to German, nor is Cockney Rhyming Slang or Nothumbrian real English in the sense of the LP.
One reason for not posting for me, is simply getting frustrated with navigating the website. For example, I start a post and then want to quote somebody from a different post so I leave what I have started to find it, but when I go back, what I have typed is gone. Is there a way to save a draft post?
The normal way to do this is to right-click on some link and choose the Open Link in New Tab option. On IOS devices you do a long press on the link and a menu appears with that option. Then you get the two web pages in different browser tabs, etc.
