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What would you call this?

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 .

•Last comment 20 days ago
šŸ’¬44
Can you read the text on this image?

Can you read the text on this image?

I

•Last comment about 1 month ago
šŸ’¬44

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, ā€œI ate a sandwichā€ would be ā€œSandwich ateā€ 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 ā€œsā€. Plus, we often omit subjects especially in short sentences. If you use ā€œIā€ too much, someone might see you as self-centered. I’m 100% serious. ā€œI’ll help you with your homeworkā€ would be ā€œHomework will help.ā€ The original English sentence sounds redundant to us. ā€œReddit on posting sentence English in writting now.ā€ 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. ā€œNo 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 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 ā€œWHAT DO YOU DO?ā€ instead of ā€œWhat’d’u’do?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 ā€œdehā€ (like in ā€œdesertā€) 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 ā€œWhy 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 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.

•Last comment about 2 months ago
šŸ’¬43
I thought I was so bad at English for a second šŸ˜‚

I thought I was so bad at English for a second šŸ˜‚

https://i.redd.it/df5yyfrkkspe1.jpeg

•Last comment 2 months ago
šŸ’¬45
Guys, can someone explain why the answer to this is "may" and not "could"?

Guys, can someone explain why the answer to this is "may" and not "could"?

https://i.redd.it/tu22xffbdyie1.png

•Last comment 3 months ago
šŸ’¬46

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?

•Last comment 4 months ago
šŸ’¬46

What’s the phrase with the opposite meaning of ā€œspeak up, pleaseā€?

I thought it was ā€œspeak downā€, 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?

•Last comment 4 months ago
šŸ’¬43
I really don't know the answer

I really don't know the answer

https://i.redd.it/4ayeqfsvqpfe1.jpeg

•Last comment 4 months ago
šŸ’¬43
What does ā€œrecess toā€ mean in this sentence?

What does ā€œrecess toā€ mean in this sentence?

https://i.redd.it/n98g46ih0hfe1.jpeg

•Last comment 4 months ago
šŸ’¬44

Never assume because it makes an ā€œASS 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 ā€œass-u-meā€ Are there any other phrases or tricks to remember certain words in the English language?

•Last comment 4 months ago
šŸ’¬46
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