Date: 6 Apr 2000 01:42:34 +0200 From: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: BSDCon East Message-ID: <8cgj1a$313f$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> References: <20000404152346.01398@techunix.technion.ac.il> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0004042145500.88181-100000@freefall.freebsd.org>
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Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.ORG> wrote: > I always think it's amusing when a foreigner outperforms a native speaker > of a language - foreigners often have more incentive to learn the > subtleties of a language than native speakers who "know it all anyway". Most of those foreigners have learned the language in school, primarily from written material. If the language in question has a strong divergence between spelling and pronunciation (English is pathological in this respect), it's not all that surprising that many foreigners turn out to be excellent at spelling. Typically it's their pronunciation that suffers. Also, grammar errors may be graded more harshly in school than spelling errors. They were for us. Writing "pronounciation" would be a simple spelling error, but confusing "its" and "it's" is considered an issue of grammar in second language teaching. > On the other hand, one of my russian friends here in the US recently gave > me a lambasting over my accent (I'm Australian) Well, I guess many of your vowels are "wrong". > This from a guy who hasn't yet mastered the word 'the' :-) Even with the smiley there, I'd like to point out that proper use of the articles in English is very difficult. It's bad enough for speakers of closely related languages. It must be hell for people whose native language doesn't use articles at all (e.g. most Slavic languages). PS: Somebody with native-level grasp of English grammar ought to proofread all man pages contributed by Jörg Wunsch and in particular check for tense/aspect of the verbs. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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