Community Discussions
Does âquiteâ just mean very?
People seem to use âquiteâ to mean very or pretty, whereas I personally think it has more of a sarcastic or slightly judgmental tone.
Why have the english never needed an official body to regulate their language?
If the english language doesn't have an official body that regulates the unique meaning of words like the Royal Spanish Academy, then how can english speakers understand the same meaning of a word when they speak to each other? How do you resolve the problem in official and formal language when two english speakers have different definitions for the same word? Why did the English never need to create an official body to legally regulate the meaning of the words they use, while the spanish did need to create one (the RAE)? Why are there peoples who need to create an organization that defines fixed definitions for the words in their language (the spanish people) and peoples who do not (the anglosaxon people)?
Was having a debate with my mom earlier tonight and came here to settle the score
So say youâre going to a movie at 8PM on Friday. And you are going to get home at 12AM, 4 hours later. Which you would call midnight My question is: would you call that âFriday at midnightâ or âSaturday at midnightâ?
Iâm done. Iâm out.
English is so difficult, Iâll never be fluent for sure. Itâs like walking in a dark cave, and all of sudden, you realize youâve been moving around the same place again and again without making any progress. Iâve 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 canât even call and respond properly because we canât catch a tiny bit of what theyâre 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, âI ate a sandwichâ would be âSandwich ateâ in my language. Verbs generally come before objects (though our language is grammatically very flexible, so word order isnât that strict). We also donât have articles like a/an/the, nor do we use plural âsâ. Plus, we often omit subjects especially in short sentences. If you use âIâ too much, someone might see you as self-centered. Iâm 100% serious. âIâll help you with your homeworkâ would be âHomework will help.â The original English sentence sounds redundant to us. âReddit on posting sentence English in writting now.â If you think this sounds weird, thatâs how English sounds to us. Another big reason is phonetics. We only use five vowels and have almost no accents. âNo accentsâ 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 donât exist in the original pronunciation. Of course, the same thing happens when we speak English. Itâs hard for us to distinguish between vowels, and we often pronounce them the same way. Plus, weâre not used to putting accents, so our English sounds so robotic. Also, the fact we donât have linking sounds contributes to our robotic speech. We enunciate each word too clearly, like saying âWHAT DO YOU DO?â instead of âWhatâdâuâdo?â 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 âdehâ (like in âdesertâ) to make it sound different from B. In our language, consonants are always followed by vowels, so we donât really focus on consonants themselves, meaning our ears arenât 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 youâre 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, youâll get undeserved treatment. Thereâs 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 âWhy are you laughing? His Portuguese is good.â 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 weâre young, and hold us back. Speaking of opportunities, there are actually almost no chances to speak English here. Weâre 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 donât need to use English unless youâre dealing with papers. Movies or novels, too. Tons of people here love entertainment from English-speaking countries but donât 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, donât give a fuck about English, of course, you wonât either. Iâm 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 canât afford to live abroad either. That said, I still tried to make myself fluent in English, devoting my time to learning it because I didnât want to let myself make excuses. But hey, Iâm done. As you can see from what I wrote here, my English sucks. Maybe 90% of you donât even understand what Iâm 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. Itâs 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 havenât 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 Iâm out of energy for this, and I canât keep rolling anymore. This journey is over right here. Salute to everyone who learns foreign languages. Yâall are special, and I wish I were like you. I didnât want to bring negativity here, but I couldnât help it. Just this once, please let me rant. I owe you one, and Iâve got your back all day, all night. Much love to yâall, 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 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/
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.
Whatâs the phrase with the opposite meaning of âspeak up, pleaseâ?
I thought it was âspeak downâ, at the first time. But this phrase seems to mean that speaking politely, as long as I looked it up on my phone. Iâm 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?
https://i.redd.it/q49qn4v7vvfe1.jpeg