To all you ESL'ers out there

[aquadyne14]

Reading one of the threads the other day got me thinking - Kudos really should go out to all you guys and gals out there who still post when english is not their mother tongue. One of the great things about this forum is that it truely is a global community and hearing everyone's experiences from all over the world is what makes it as rich as it is here! posting at first is so intimidating at the best of times and that is when english is your first language, i can't even imagine how much harder it would be for those who speak other languages! my friend's mom (when we were in school waaaaay back in the day lol) was an english as a second language teacher and she told us of the trials and tribulations of trying to learn this crazy mixed up language! they spent a whole class talking just about the word jam that would drive me nuts! i was in french immersion through school and let me tell ya, it was so much easier to learn that then when i had to start learning english, and english is supposively my first language . sooooo in short (even though this is completely long winded! lol) Kudos to you all who took a risk and helped make this forum as multicultural as it is

[littlesneezer18]

Add my thanks to this one! Hooray to all you non-native-english speaking people! It's got to be SO hard ,but you do it anyway, and you speak our crazy language with amazing fluency!!!!! WOOHOO!

[Guest]

Absolutely, Kudos indeed. I know my grasp of german isn't good enough to have a conversation for any length of time so you guys do a great job. And let me tell you, I worked with young teens before I left school (woot) and some of their english is far worse than you guys. They've been speaking English all their lives!!

[The Mute Poet]

Agreed here on all counts. I've always thought that one of the greatest things about coming to the forum is that we're treated to flavors and viewpoints from all walk of life, the world over. That only happens, though, if others are brave enough to venture in here and have at it in a language they might not necessarily be perfectly comfortable with. Thank you all for making that effort and bear in mind that (from my perspective, at least) the old place just wouldn't be the same without your additions!

[GoldenOwl]

Indeed. I give ya guys props.

[count tiszula]

Yes, I am constantly amazed by people's linguistic skills; whenever I don't understand some internetspeak or Californian, it's usually a non-English speaker who sets me right.

As I native Englishman, I can only apologize that English is so easy and doesn't have anything like enough irregular verbs [always my criterion for a good language]. And a good thing that you do not live in England, where the very idea of learning English is regarded with horror...

[Mirf]

Ok .. i really have to ask this .. just what does "ESL" stand for in that case ? Only time i've ever heard that was as a short for Electronic Sports League but i seriously doubt that's it. also anything with "English speaking" wouldn't make much sense .. since it is about not speaking english, right ? So what does it mean? I can't even come up with anything remotely close .

Nooo wait .. second? English Second Languagers? Hmmm ... i dunno .

edit:

edited cause i really AM one of those

[atchoum]

I know a couple of French sneeze fetishists who do not contribute because they say they have no pleasure struggling through a foreign language, even if the subject itself is sneezes. So there are people who do not contribute simply because of the language barrier.

In French they talk of FLE (français langue étrangère) so English as a second language (deutsch als Fremdsprache ?) - which implies that a second language is not a foreign language, so second language speakers of English are considered honorary English speakers... ?

[Jemmabean]

Es ist dieselbe Sache als Deutsch als Fremdsprache, mirf. Und du hast allerdings Recht - es meint "English as Second Language."

Edit: - je m'excuse atchoum, vous l'avez déjà dit. Oops!

[sneezomania]

Oh, didn't find this thread until TYS did the recent post ... well, honestly, it's good to know that the participation of the "non-natives" is appreciated so much. You're right in what you're saying, expressing one's thoughts in a foreign language can be quite hard sometimes.

I like writing lyrics for songs, but all of them are in German. Why? For two reasons: The first being that singing in German is much easier for me than singing in any other language for simple pronunciation reasons. (Glad you don't know how bad my spoken - or sung - English is, much worse than my written English. ) But even if I write lyrics to be sung by someone else, they're always in German - for the second reason: I simply can express myself much better in German than in any other language (and the only language except German in which I can really communicate is English). There are many musicians in Germany who prefer to sing in English because the language is more "round", less harsh than German, I'm not one of them.

I actually wondered whether I should write fiction for the SFF because I doubted that my English is good enough for that, good enough for writing fiction with the language-wise quality I want it to have. One the other hand, I'm one of many non-natives here, and the staff explicitly asks the users not to be "spelling and grammar nazis", and all this encouraged my to go ahead and take the challenge to write fiction, observations, contributions to discussions in English. But there's always the dictionary lying on my computer desk - meanwhile I know a lot of English vocabulary having to do with sneezing, but there are still a lot of gaps to be filled.

So my thanks go out to you for ... (thinking right now ... how should I express this in English?) ... for respecting my attempts to participate in English (as well as those of the other non-natives) so much.