[Fernando Lino]

I go for my friend and "I" sounds better to me

the correct sentences are "Different from" and "my friend and I" of course
I've seen letters with "are clients" instead "OUR clients"

[SunlightRocker]

I think I would have said "my friend and me", but then I remembered (can I say remebered?) that my english is soooo bad, I hardly can spell my own name translated to it. (yeh, I know its the same, Im not stupid, it was a joke. )

[ivox3]

Well I certainly try and be conscientious about the grammar thing, ...but mistakes will happen !

Hervé so kindly pointed out that I've been mixing the words [we're and were] for awhile. Bad mental typing habit ..... What ya gonna do?

thx H.

[-Adrian]

I also noticed that my typos really skyrocket when i'm tired, so if i post something very late and check back the next day i usually stumble over lots of errors in my own post.

For germans there are a lot of traps in the english language since both share the same root. For instance we got "bekommen" but it doesn't translate to "become" as expected, it means "to get" instead. Same with word positioning in sentences, i can sometimes see that a german person has written the text by looking at the word placement.

I recently relearned to type "which" correctly, for some reason i got on the "wich" train, always felt something was wrong so i looked it up and it's back to normal now

[jdp]

funny, the "wich|which" typo it happens also to me very often... other than this my english usually sucks, but I am improving it reading and writing here: a side effect of buying maxwell I guess.

[superbad]

the correct sentences are "Different from" and "my friend and I" of course

It's not that simple. "My friend and I" is correct only when used as the subject of a sentence, as in:

My friend and I went to the store.

When the object of a sentence, "my friend and me" is correct:

A truck hit my friend and me.

A simple way to remember which one to use is to remove the words "my friend and" from the sentence. The sentence should still be grammatically correct without them. The sentence "A truck hit I" is nonsense.

Also, I despise the Rosetta Stone method of learning a language. It's one of those ideas that seems good in theory but is terrible in practice. The only method that has worked well for me is Pimsleur. The disadvantage to it is that you only learn speaking and listening, not reading and writing. Nevertheless, I was able to get pretty far in Chinese using it.

[jdp]

I know what the rosetta stone is but I have no clue what the rosetta stone method is: there's anyone kind enough to explain it? I am googling for it anyhow...

edit: it clearly has nothing to do with hieroglyphs and greeks alphabet correspondence, right?! I must admit I completely misunderstood what you guys were talking about...

[ivox3]

[ivox3]

Sure it does ! .....they're talking about using big rocks to translate language codes.

right ??



www.rosettastone.com

[misterasset]

What? There's a website for Rosetta Stone? Damn. And I spent all that money aquiring a quarry and a chisel (The expensive part being the quarry. I can afford a chisel.). Now what am I going to do?

Seriously, any clues? I mean, most of the people in the group are from Europe, how did y'all (Texas saying) learn English? Is it taught in school along with French, German, Spanish or whatever? Do you pick it up from TV, magazines, books? I'm curious because even though it's not perfect (and yes, we've spent enough time pointing out that mine isn't perfect either ) it is very passable for speaking purposes.

I'm going to Japan next year (first time out of the United States, a little worried of the disdain from others I'm going to experience) and my friend from Korea is going to come with me. I'd love to impress her by at least having a working knowledge of the languages.

[PA3K]

I am Slovak, so my english is far from perfect, but i want to note some funny things about language. My friend gave me some link to document called (oposite of) teacher of English (i don`t know if this word even exist in english) and it was so funny. There was dictionary of phrases translated from slovak to english and oposite, but it was exact (metaphrase, construe) translation that is not true, just funny, because you couldn`t translate phrase (idioms) exactly. That is because you can`t watch foreigner movie (comedy) with dubbing. Example
In slovak: Na zdravie!
In english: cheer!
Exact translation: On the health! na=on zdravie=health

In slovak: Pustila som ho k vode.
In english: We breaked up. (girl about her ex-boyfriend)
Exact translation: I have released him to the water. pustit=released k vode=to the water

-Isiel spity pod obraz.
-He went totally drunk.
-He went drunk under the picture. spity=drunk pod=under obraz=picture

-Tam je pes zakopany!
-There is the mean point!
-The dog is dug over there! pes=dog zakopany=dug tam=over there

Here is the link http://bbs.inway.cz/bbs2www/CZhumor/060c

If you will not understand english translation, i can tell you the real translation (or the real meaning of those slovak phrases)

Patrik

[Jozvex]

Why bother speaking accurately a language that is inconsistent anyway...

Yes I totally agree. English is pretty ridiculous in a lot of ways. Still, speaking with reasonable grammar does look way nicer! There are always TV reports about how students just don't understand spelling and grammar these days "like they used to" and they'll have some english scholar saying "English has rules and grammar for a reason you know."... That's true but perhaps the reason why students find it hard to learn, is due to the fact that all the rules only apply half of the time and the rest is all just made up! And now I give you a poem (not written by me, hehe):

We'll begin with box, the plural is boxes.
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of mouse is never meese.
You may find a lone mouse, or a whole nest of mice,
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always men,
Why shoulnd't the plural of pan be called pen?
The cow in the plural may be called cows or kine,
But a bow, if repeated, is never called bine;
And the plural of vow is vows, not vine.

If I speak of a foot and you show me two feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
If the singular's this, and the plural these,
Should the plural of kiss ever be written kese?
We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say mothren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his, and him,
But imagine the feminine, she, shis, and shim!
So English, I think you all will agree,
Is the funniest language you ever did see.

So there! A basic example of why english completely sucks as far as any kind of rules or logic goes.

As for other languages, I used to learn italian when I was at school but I can only remember how to count and some basic phrases now. Io non sono italiano e non parlo molto bene italiano. (hehe that was probably wrong!!)

I used to never care about this kind of thing, but for the last few months (on and off) I've been learning Esperanto and... as a language that has no exceptions or weird broken rules it makes for a much easier language to learn.

Kaj kun tio, mi diras adiaux!
(And with that, I say goodbye!)

[Mihai]

Always get a laugh from this site: http://www.engrish.com

[glypticmax]

I will never forget the first Purchase Order I got from a Japanese factory for my work.
It specified "grass englaving" rather than glass engraving.
Which is far more accurate than if I had tried to say the same thing in Japanese.
They became a generous, supportive and appreciative client for many years. I learned that no matter how much I tried to be otherwise, I was at best considered to be a skilled and respected *barbarian*.
Which was not a totally bad thing.
The moral of the story being.......bring your own native born translator to the table. They are worth the $$$$.
And as far as Enlish is concerned, I still recall spending summers with my Appalachian relatives each summer and not understanding a fraction of what they said. As example, "flowers" was pronounced "flares".
My guess is that most Europeans traveling around the Southeast US would have a difficult time understanding the historical dialects.
Which only highlights the richness of the language.

[jdp]

In slovak: Na zdravie!
In english: cheer!
Exact translation: On the health! na=on zdravie=health

that's nice! for this you have a pretty perfect translation in italian: salve. The word is now just a plain greetings, but it comes from the latin verb salvere which means "stay health", as in slovak.

@misterasset. the situation is pretty different for every country here in europe; generally in northern europe (holland, denmark, sweden, norway, finland, germany...) they speak english way better than us in the south-latin part. this is probably due to the fact that the language shares similar roots and grammar with english. As long with this I am pretty sure they study it much more than us in school and they have a lot of movies and TV shows not translated. Something similar happens in greece I guess. In Switzerland they have 4 official languages (french, german, italian and romancio) and a bunch of dialects, no wonder they learn english pretty easy. I heard that in england and ireland they also speak english.

Here in italy english is pretty unknown, mostly spoken in tourist places, and sometimes even not there. We must study it during school, which equals to null. I for my studied french during school (and ancient greek and latin, but not for speaking purposes!), and learnt english by myself (as you can easily notice) travelling, reading, writing and browsing the internet.

@Jozvex, your italian sentence is perfect.

@maihi, great funny link