Community Discussions
What would you call this?
This is a device used for drinking mate . What do you call such a tool? I thought it was a straw .
Can you read the text on this image?
I
Iām done. Iām out.
English is so difficult, Iāll never be fluent for sure. Itās like walking in a dark cave, and all of sudden, you realize youāve been moving around the same place again and again without making any progress. Iāve 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 canāt even call and respond properly because we canāt catch a tiny bit of what theyāre 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, āI ate a sandwichā would be āSandwich ateā in my language. Verbs generally come before objects (though our language is grammatically very flexible, so word order isnāt that strict). We also donāt have articles like a/an/the, nor do we use plural āsā. Plus, we often omit subjects especially in short sentences. If you use āIā too much, someone might see you as self-centered. Iām 100% serious. āIāll help you with your homeworkā would be āHomework will help.ā The original English sentence sounds redundant to us. āReddit on posting sentence English in writting now.ā If you think this sounds weird, thatās how English sounds to us. Another big reason is phonetics. We only use five vowels and have almost no accents. āNo accentsā 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 donāt exist in the original pronunciation. Of course, the same thing happens when we speak English. Itās hard for us to distinguish between vowels, and we often pronounce them the same way. Plus, weāre not used to putting accents, so our English sounds so robotic. Also, the fact we donāt have linking sounds contributes to our robotic speech. We enunciate each word too clearly, like saying āWHAT DO YOU DO?ā instead of āWhatādāuādo?ā 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 ādehā (like in ādesertā) to make it sound different from B. In our language, consonants are always followed by vowels, so we donāt really focus on consonants themselves, meaning our ears arenāt 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 youāre 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, youāll get undeserved treatment. Thereās 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 āWhy are you laughing? His Portuguese is good.ā 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 weāre young, and hold us back. Speaking of opportunities, there are actually almost no chances to speak English here. Weāre 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 donāt need to use English unless youāre dealing with papers. Movies or novels, too. Tons of people here love entertainment from English-speaking countries but donāt 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, donāt give a fuck about English, of course, you wonāt either. Iām 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 canāt afford to live abroad either. That said, I still tried to make myself fluent in English, devoting my time to learning it because I didnāt want to let myself make excuses. But hey, Iām done. As you can see from what I wrote here, my English sucks. Maybe 90% of you donāt even understand what Iām 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. Itās 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 havenāt 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 Iām out of energy for this, and I canāt keep rolling anymore. This journey is over right here. Salute to everyone who learns foreign languages. Yāall are special, and I wish I were like you. I didnāt want to bring negativity here, but I couldnāt help it. Just this once, please let me rant. I owe you one, and Iāve got your back all day, all night. Much love to yāall, peace out.
I thought I was so bad at English for a second š
https://i.redd.it/df5yyfrkkspe1.jpeg
Guys, can someone explain why the answer to this is "may" and not "could"?
https://i.redd.it/tu22xffbdyie1.png
Is a "native speaker" level achievable?
As an active English learner, quite often I see posts on Instagram about how you either can speak/use the language like a native speaker, or cannot at all because you were not born in the language environment to begin with. First thing first, I understand that it's almost impossible to get rid of your accent, and it's not what I want to focus on in this post. On one hand, yes, natives have a huge advantage of having been born and raised in the language environment, and it's very hard to catch up with people who already had such a head start in their "language learning". On the other hand, a "native speaker" is not a level of fluency. Listening to and reading texts from natives of my first language, I understand that the gap in fluency among them can be huge. Hence, I can imagine that a well-educated and eloquent non-native can be more proficient in a language than a native who just isn't educated enough. So, do you think it's possible to use the language as well as (some) native do it, and will there always be a significant gap between those who were born with a language and those who studied it in a non-immersive environment?
Whatās the phrase with the opposite meaning of āspeak up, pleaseā?
I thought it was āspeak downā, at the first time. But this phrase seems to mean that speaking politely, as long as I looked it up on my phone. Iām confused about it. Can you help me understand this?
I really don't know the answer
https://i.redd.it/4ayeqfsvqpfe1.jpeg
What does ārecess toā mean in this sentence?
https://i.redd.it/n98g46ih0hfe1.jpeg
Never assume because it makes an āASS out of U and MEā
My dad would tell me this when I was a child and insisted it would help me remember how to spell the word assume āass-u-meā Are there any other phrases or tricks to remember certain words in the English language?