What stops you posting on EuroGA?

Rich wrote:

Brits, who are terrible at learning foreign languages

I thought that for many years until I realized that the French are far worse than us Brits. How many French pilots do you see crossing the channel? Not many, and the reason is they are not good with English. This I had from a French flying instructor. Mind you, if the international language of aviation was French, I wouldn’t be flying outside of the UK.

Propman wrote:

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.

That happens on the iPad all the time, must be a problem of the Safari browser under iOS. One of the reasons why I don’t bother to post from tablet and smartphone any more… It does not happen on the desktop Macintosh.

ToniK wrote:

Also, the prevalence of native British English speakers does flavo(u)r our discussions. Many people are used to (American) TV English and Brits may come across a bit snobby.

You know I was going to mention that but I thought I was the only one taking the Brits for a very dry sense of humor and totally rigid. All with the exception of course, “Women know your place” which must have been written in some pub somewhere. LOL

achimha wrote:

achimha 13-Nov-15 13:36 #42
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.

Thats priceless!

Mooney_Driver wrote:

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.

Yeah I had the same problem not sure what level it was but Miss Crabtree in 7th grade gave me a devil of a time.

I think one of the main reasons stopping people from posting would be the fact that in this forum, there are a number of active participants who have such a depth of knowledge that, when a question is asked, I tend to think: yes, I could answer that question but xxx could explain it in so much more detail than I could and, in my case, I’ve considered answering a post and then scrapped the answer because I was sure that a better answer was forthcoming. Lo and behold, it did. So, long story short is that I will post when I feel that I can actually contribute something to the forum of worth rather than the usual “+1” we see in other forums in order to gain forum points…….

Maybe the basic supposition is incorrect that if all the silent readers would start posting messages, the forum would improve in quality? I already have a hard time keeping up sometimes, imagine if the number of messages increased tenfold.

But I think that is not what you intended to know, how to increase quantity; rather how to motivate the silent and expert readers to share more of their wisdom. Which also supposes that these exist. I think if you wanted to encourage that, you would need to replicate a system like stackexchange (which btw exists also for aviation related questions). That means stating a question and then showing the “best answer” right below.

dublinpilot wrote:

In written form, I couldn’t distinguish your English from a native speaker. It’s certainly level 6 in written form!

Very Kind of you @dublinpilot to encourage me, but believe me, that you would have no problem to destinguish it, when we meet one day on a EuroGA meet up. However I was in Ireland a few years ago and they understood me – at least they pretended to

@europax
You’re very welcome Indeed hopefully we can meet up at a flyin in the future!

Rwy20 wrote:

But I think that is not what you intended to know, how to increase quantity; rather how to motivate the silent and expert readers to share more of their wisdom

I don’t think it’s JUST about quality. Many can be put off because they don’t think that their posts can be of such high quality compared to others. But I think we all have something that we can contribute if we wish, which others will value.

During the summer Peter encouraged people to post some trip reports and many did. There are plenty of pilots here doing really long flights, traversing the whole of Europe in a day, and while reading those reports, it can be easy to think that “Nobody would be interested in my 1 hour hop!”. But the reality is quite different. For me, I manage to get one trip per year that takes me beyond Ireland and the UK. So when I see someone doing a trip report of a one hour hop across Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland it really is of interest to me. These are countries that I will go years between visiting, and many that I’ve not visited yet. So seeing a trip report from a “local flight” there is really interesting and an enjoyable read, and great looking at the photos.

Noone should be nervous about posting their own trip reports simply because the flight seems routine to them. To those of us to leave far away from where they do, it’s an exotic flight and really interesting!

I enjoyed a lot of such VFR trip reports this summer, and I hope that there are plenty more here next summer. In this case quantity is important too, and doesn’t need a huge range or experience or technical knowledge.