Re: Newbie About to loose hair!!

From: Circuit Breaker (bagboy6437_at_shipaol.com)
Date: 01/09/04 

Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2004 08:35:50 -0500

Okay, I'll bite and add my 2 cents to a post by someone who I do not
recognize...

Bottom-posting from slrn? How rude! If you MUST bottom-post, use a
Microsoft product to do it! ;-)

Bottom-post sorta kinda fixed...

Base Article: 1073590565.45088.0@iris.uk.clara.net

Quote Level : Culpable Party
<none> : Me, of course
> : Hrvoje Spoljar
>> : Garry Knight
>>> : Juha Siltala
>>>> : Jeffrey Silverman
>>>>> : Jason Petersen

>>>>> That said, the wrong usage of loose/lose, there/their/they're,
>>>>> brake/break, stake/steak, ect. drive me crazy also.
>>>> How about affect/effect? That one drives me bonkers.
>>> Yah, mispelings bather me grately to.
>> But don't loose your cool or you'll brake something. Don't let they're
>> misteaks effect you!
 
> I can't believe my eyes HONEST, has any of you smart asses ever thought
> about how easy it is for someone whose mother tongue isn't english

I have a Bosnian friend. His mother tongue is, of course, Bosnian. He
also speaks French, German, and English. Croatian as well, I believe.

I love to poke fun at his spelling mistakes - mainly because they're so
rare as to REALLY stick out. He has only been speaking English for
approximately 7 years, give or take, so in some respects he can't be
expected to have it perfect, but he certainly has come pretty close.

As for his grammar, I give him plenty of leeway. In the United States, we
often say "What the f*%k?!!?" about stuff... for the first year I knew
him, his version was "What is the f*%k?!!?" Simple stuff like adding the
"is" is funny to me - because it's such a simple thing, and they don't
teach these phrases in English class. In fact, proper grammar demands
"what IS the ..." instead of "what the ...". He just didn't realize it
was slang, and nobody bothered to tell him until he was dating my sister.
 
> People learn from movies, books ... anything they get in contact with so

No they don't. They're poisoned by movies. They DO learn from CERTAIN
books, but others, meant purely for artistic writing, often do not teach
proper grammar OR spelling - Mark Twain's _Tom_Sawyer_ is an example. In
large, unless the work's intent was to teach, chances are people won't
learn anything from them but the most common slang.

Which explains why so many Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in my area can't
speak proper English worth a crap.

> it's a miracle how they manage to learn from English materials (books,
> net etc) and communicate in English and yet be understood.

No it's not. I play a game called Delta Force. In the game, there are
provisions for one-line chats. We frequently get people in the game who
speak only Brazilian Portuguese. I can't comprehend a lick of it, but
with the help of www.free-translator.com and others, I have begun to
understand a few of the most common words. I was told that portuguese and
spanish share about 80% of their dialect. I have yet to see where.

Anyway, not a miracle. Anyone who wants to learn has the resources
available. They just need to use them effectively.

> So I ask all of u flamers how many languages u speak, or perhaps how
> many FOREIGN LANGUAGES YOU SPEAK and WRITE

I'm not a flamer, but I fluently speak one language and I can probably
munge enough Spanish to survive in Puerto Rico, but that's about it.

Then again, I don't need the language, and since I rarely use it, I would
have difficulty retaining what I learn anyway.

> PS. for the Jeffrey Silverman n others in text below it's a 'bother' not
> 'bather'
> And just one more fact I can tell from my own experience that people
> whose mother tongue isn't English have better knowledge of grammar than
> the native speakers.

Sadly, this is true. Except for the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in my
area. It's easy to see why: They are concerned with learning the
language, whereas the natives are not. The natives grow up learning a
certain dialect, in order to communicate with their family.
Unfortunately, this is so effective a way to learn a language that in our
school system here, they teach spanish as though you're a kindergartener
learning a first language, which as a 7th grader, is stupid. Also, later
in life, people learn a certain 'street slang' that their friends use...
Then they start hanging around the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in my area
who pick up the same bad habits... It doesn't help when our own public
school system seems so incapable of teaching these basic fundamentals to
our children at an early age. We're too bothered by making sure they can
spell the same words like cat and dog over and over for 6 years of
elementary school before even introducing them to grammar - and by that
time, it's too late.
 By 7th grade, they're already 12 or 13 years old, already at that stage
where they are beginning to realize that they already know everything
(after all, they knew how to spell cat and dog by first grade, so they
already know it by now). By this time, it's too late to try to teach them
the grammar, because they're in the "I don't need none o' this, I'm in tha
brothahood, tha gang, I gots mah homies to look aftah me, I's gots mah
brothas!"

Morons.

When it comes down to it though, in the end, the intellectuals like us who
*DO* know the right way to spell cat and dog and DO know how to use these
words properly will be the ones who survive longer. I can only hope that
the ones who don't care, who think the gang is all they need in life, that
their genes do not continue to be passed along in the pool.

But that's my 2 cents. 

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