Community Discussions
I’m done. I’m out.
English is so difficult, I’ll never be fluent for sure. It’s like walking in a dark cave, and all of sudden, you realize you’ve been moving around the same place again and again without making any progress. I’ve lost all hope. My English will be never good. No excuse, but my country is infamous for being bad at English. Many athletes from my country have played in English-speaking countries, yet they use translators no matter how many years they've lived there. While musicians from English-speaking countries come here for concerts, we can’t even call and respond properly because we can’t catch a tiny bit of what they’re saying. One of the biggest reasons is the grammatical difference between English and our language. Our sentence structure is completely opposite to English. For example, “I ate a sandwich” would be “Sandwich ate” in my language. Verbs generally come before objects (though our language is grammatically very flexible, so word order isn’t that strict). We also don’t have articles like a/an/the, nor do we use plural “s”. Plus, we often omit subjects especially in short sentences. If you use “I” too much, someone might see you as self-centered. I’m 100% serious. “I’ll help you with your homework” would be “Homework will help.” The original English sentence sounds redundant to us. “Reddit on posting sentence English in writting now.” If you think this sounds weird, that’s how English sounds to us. Another big reason is phonetics. We only use five vowels and have almost no accents. “No accents” is a slight exaggeration, but compared to other languages, our accent is so weak and nearly flat. So, when English speakers say the names of our athletes, celebrities, or characters, it sounds off because they unconsciously replace the vowels and add accents that don’t exist in the original pronunciation. Of course, the same thing happens when we speak English. It’s hard for us to distinguish between vowels, and we often pronounce them the same way. Plus, we’re not used to putting accents, so our English sounds so robotic. Also, the fact we don’t have linking sounds contributes to our robotic speech. We enunciate each word too clearly, like saying “WHAT DO YOU DO?” instead of “What’d’u’do?” The consonants are very different too. I bet almost all of us struggle with R and L, and V and B. I've seen many advance learners still mix them up, even after decades of learning. You might be surprised, but confusing B and D is also common here. When we need to say B and D (like choosing an answer from A, B, C and D in school), we pronounce D as “deh” (like in “desert”) to make it sound different from B. In our language, consonants are always followed by vowels, so we don’t really focus on consonants themselves, meaning our ears aren’t built to distinguish them. Another possible reason is our traditional attitude toward learning foreign languages. It might sound crazy, but if you try to speak like a native speaker in school or in public and you’re not fluent enough, people will laugh at you. It sucks because one of the goals of language learning is to sound like a native, but once you try to do so, you’ll get undeserved treatment. There’s an infamous, disgusting video where a boy interviewed Cristiano Ronaldo in Portuguese, and adults around them laughed at him. That video drove me crazy when I first saw it. He might not have been fluent, but he made a great effort, and that deserved nothing but respect. What made the video famous was that after hearing the laughter, Ronald said to them “Why are you laughing? His Portuguese is good.” Shout out to CR, and the wholesome part is that eight years later, the kid became a national soccer champion in high school. Anyway, this cultural attitude might make us overly embarrassed to use English, especially when we’re young, and hold us back. Speaking of opportunities, there are actually almost no chances to speak English here. We’re an extremely homogeneous country where nearly everyone speaks the same language. And this is a double-edged sword, but everything imported here is translated or dubbed. That means that even at the graduate university level, there are books in our languages, and you don’t need to use English unless you’re dealing with papers. Movies or novels, too. Tons of people here love entertainment from English-speaking countries but don’t understand a single word of English because everything is dubbed, subtitled, or translated. So, for almost all of us, English is just another school subject, not a tool for communication or consuming contents. And if your parents, friends, teachers, everyone around you, don’t give a fuck about English, of course, you won’t either. I’m pretty much sure there are more reasons, but these are just what came to my mind off the top of my head. Being born and raised here is a nightmare for language learning. My broke ass can’t afford to live abroad either. That said, I still tried to make myself fluent in English, devoting my time to learning it because I didn’t want to let myself make excuses. But hey, I’m done. As you can see from what I wrote here, my English sucks. Maybe 90% of you don’t even understand what I’m trying to say, and my hard-to-read sentences annoy the shit out of you. Even I myself get a headache reading my own poor English. It’s like English rejects me. Time and effort will never pay off, and they only make me realize how dumb I am. Some of you might say I haven’t put in enough effort. Maybe you're right. Considering that some people here are nailing English (while the percentage is low, our country is fairly big, so there must be a decent amount of people who can speak it), my situation is just a consequence of my stupidity and lack of effort. But I’m out of energy for this, and I can’t keep rolling anymore. This journey is over right here. Salute to everyone who learns foreign languages. Y’all are special, and I wish I were like you. I didn’t want to bring negativity here, but I couldn’t help it. Just this once, please let me rant. I owe you one, and I’ve got your back all day, all night. Much love to y’all, peace out.
In the sentence 'We waters his lawn every so often,' why is 'waters' used instead of 'water'?
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What's a yogurt girl?
I think I just got insulted
What's the difference between "he dropped the ball" and "he shit the bed"?
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnglishLearning/comments/1j09o0p/whats_the_difference_between_he_dropped_the_ball/
What's the difference between finding out and realizing
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"Yay big" with or without the actual estimate of the size?
Hi! This is my first post in this sub. I work at a language school (not in English-native country, and of course I'm not a native speaker of English) and from time to time I have to explain various stuff of my country to international students. Just a part of my job. One time I talked about a specific kind of envelope used by the local government. I said to one of the students "... like yay big?" with my hand gestures trying to give him an idea of how big it would actually be. That student pointed out for me that one has to specify how big it'd be by stating with actual numbers of estimate, e.g. 6 inches or 3 feet or whatever it is, when saying "yay big". Btw he's from America. Some days have passed and I watched an American TV show and I saw the scene where a character talks about his dog and says "... yay big?" with his hand gesture showing how big his dog is, but didn't say any number like 4 feet or something. So which is common/correct, "yay big" with or without numbers? Or does it depend on what kind of situation it is? Give me any insight and I'd appreciate it!
I seriously didn't know that "bus" is an abbreviation of "omnibus" until today.
According to The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, the first appearance of this shortened form in the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1832.
What’s the phrase with the opposite meaning of “speak up, please”?
I thought it was “speak down”, at the first time. But this phrase seems to mean that speaking politely, as long as I looked it up on my phone. I’m confused about it. Can you help me understand this?
I really don't know the answer
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Native speakers, how do you feel about this?
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