fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #1756 ]

[ SECRET POST #1756 ]

⌈ Secret Post #1756 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 07 pages, 165 secrets from Secret Submission Post #251.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 1 2 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeats ]
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Actually, what bothers me the most is how self-entitled some native speakers are. Yes, when we dare venture into the English-speaking word, we should absolutely do our best to use the language correctly. But you know what? If you, for some reason, decided to come to a Swedish forum, not only would you be able to make yourself understood, we would probably switch to English just to accomodate you (we're polite that way). I think what most native speakers tend to forget is that there are many people who are required to learn English as a second language. For me, it was compulsory from third grade. I'm not complaining about that; I think English is a very useful language, just because of how universal it it, and I love how knowing English makes it possible for me to keep in touch with people from all over the world.

But if English is your first language, you can go practically anywhere and odds are you will be able to find at least someone who will understand you, and you won't even have to make an effort, while, for some of us, communicating with you in a respectful way can be very hard work.

Please don't take us for granted.

Thank you. This so much.

This is actually one of the reasons I never ~~bothered~~ managed to learn Slovenian when I lived there for several years: because I could nearly always find someone who spoke enough English wherever I went! Stores, banks, city halls, hospitals - everywhere! I was French, they were Slovenes, and we would communicate in English. English was also the language my Slovene husband and I used between us, ever since the day we met - to the point that English is actually the first tongue our son learned O.o

Now compare that to my experience as an exchange student in Western Canada, where I could count the number of people I knew who spoke any French on my fingers, even though it's the other official language...

Oh man, it was a surprise to find a mention of Slovenian while absent-mindedly browsing F!S. :D But this reminds me of a group of students from USA we met last summer who were staying in Slovenia for a while and also learning Slovenian while they were here, and they were always jokingly complaining about how they couldn't even try to use the language because as soon as they said something, people figured out that they weren't native speakers (it's very obvious especially with Americans) and just started speaking English to them. I think it's a mixture of our eternal inferiority complex and a wish to show off with our English.

(Though tbf, Slovenian is not a very easy language. I honestly really admire everyone who learns it as a foreign language, especially if their first language is a non-Slavic one.)

LOL! Yeah, sometimes I think that Slovenia could just go ahead and declare English as its second official language, considering how many people speak it well enough ;)

For the record, your inferiority complex, or rather the way you over-compensate for it like woah, is both hilarious and awe-inspiring :D For example, the number of Olympic-level athletes of all kinds your tiny country somehow manages to produce seems just impossible! And the weirdest part is how nobody ever makes a big deal of it O.o Like it's just normal for pretty much everyone to know or be related to some kind of Big Name in whatever field :P

Also, Slovenian broke my brain :P Okay, granted, I was in such bad physical and mental health at the time that I didn't have much brain left to break anyway, but still! Six cases, three genders, and WTH is up with dual D: !? Oh, and since when does anyone pronounce the letter R using their tongue O.o ?? Was that language purposely designed to be unlearnable or something :D ? Still, it's always been very nice on my ears, with just the right balance of German-like roughness and Italian-like flowing-ness :)

LOL let's not even start about our athletes. Everyone's like, "guys, there's 2 million people in your country and you got like 5 Olympic medals? WHOA" and we're just like, yeah, BUT THAT ONE ATHLETE WE THOUGHT WOULD BRING A MEDAL HOME DIDN'T EVEN MAKE IT TO THE FINALS OMG SHAME SHAME SHUN HIM/HER FOREVER. And then there's the intense love-hate relationship we have with our national football team and its coaches. Also, we expect our athletes to be awesome at everything always, but providing them with actual good conditions to train in is just too expensive and too much work! Sometimes I feel like if you put our athletes somewhere with actual proper infrastructure and professionals to work with and everything, they could take over the world. Though maybe then they'd be missing the right mentality for it, so who knows. (To be fair, when athletes get really good results, things get ecstatic at least for a little while. Last year's football World Cup caused a nation-wide euphoria. I've been to a few receptions that were organised for the Olympic athletes or the football NT and it was AMAZING. And going to a sports competition at a time when we're doing well is my favourite thing.)

HDU DUAL IS BEAUTIFUL AND ROMANTIC :P lol it was seriously surprising to me when I learned that only a few languages use it. :D I don't have an excuse for three genders, though. I don't think anyone actually understands what that's good for, since you can't even use it for, for example, people who don't ID as either male or female, because it would sound horribly offensive. But yeah, it's all pretty complicated. I studied Japanese for a little while and we had a teacher from Japan who had been living here for five years and I was SO IMPRESSED with her Slovenian, especially since Japanese and Slovenian are absolutely nothing alike.

... well now I've gone and tl;dr'd at you, haven't I. Sorry, it's just terribly exciting for me to find Slovenians or people who know something about Slovenia on the internet. :D

LOL! Exactly :D !

Also, we expect our athletes to be awesome at everything always, but providing them with actual good conditions to train in is just too expensive and too much work!

*snort* Yeah, my husband was always telling me about how this one was training in Croatia, and those ones in Austria, and that team who actually trains in Ljubljana? Yeah, it's in someone's under-equipped basement :P

Last year's football World Cup caused a nation-wide euphoria.

Actually, I think that's just the magic of football ;) I don't like football at all, but when France got to the semi-finals, and then the finals in 1998, I was right there watching the games with everyone else. And when we won... They say there was one million people on the Champs-Elysées to greet the team :) (Which would make it half of Slovenia's population O.o ... and there goes my brain again :D )

HDU DUAL IS BEAUTIFUL AND ROMANTIC :P

... You know, I never looked at it this way. Now that you mention it, though, it's true that it can be rather sweet to have a whole thing just for two people :) It makes all the difference between "You and I" and "You and I and someone else too", doesn't it? Hmm...

I wouldn't have minded the three genders too much, if it had been a bit more obvious what gender a word was. If you assume the wrong gender, then you get the case wrong, which means you get the sentence wrong! Aaah, my poor brain D: ! Also, I'll never forgive Slovenian for having 'girl' be of the neutral gender :P

I studied Japanese for a little while and we had a teacher from Japan who had been living here for five years and I was SO IMPRESSED with her Slovenian, especially since Japanese and Slovenian are absolutely nothing alike.

Some people are just talented with languages. My (now ex-)husband speaks five languages (Slovenian, Croatian, German, English, and French) and he keeps looking into other languages for fun :D

Pfft, you can tl;dr at me all you want :D I do it too :P But as for meeting Slovenians on the net... I ran into a high school friend of my husband's on a board I used to be on a few years ago, and I made a fandom friend once only to discover later on that she was Slovenian ;) You might actually have run into other Slovenians already, but since none of you guys advertise that you're from Slovenia... Yeah :P

Of course, now, I'm wondering what the chances are that you know my ex-husband, or even, *gasp*, that we've met or heard of each other at some point...

My gosh thank you two so much! I'm enjoying this conversation like you wouldn't believe. :)

Gotta say though, that's a reminder on that the ESL person's native language would have a huge impact on how well they learn English. I think I'm on a disadvantage on learning languages in general because my native language has a fairly straight forward grammar structure. The word "the" alone is enough to drive me apes!

You know, this is interesting because this parallels so much with some of the Caucasian people who went to China hoping to learn Chinese. Many of them are dead competent in it, but they are still treated as the "white foreigner" and get defaulted into English. Even if the person in question don't speak a single word of English anyway, they still get talked to in English!

Even more face palmy and hilarious is when they get approached on the streets for "English speaking practice".

This tends to be a Caucasian only situation, too. :S

You know, I made a comment yesterday but I thought more about it it rings truer. Just look at the amount of comments here demanding people to speak perfect English because "it's an English site" - Livejournal is Russian owned, and just look at how well it catered for us non-Russian speakers, well enough that people think that it's an English First place. Yes I get LJ's history and whatever, but the thing is now it's owned by a Russian company and they still made efforts on updating their English department. In places like Pixiv even if the English option isn't perfect, they still try to make us to feel included.

I wonder if this entitlement is because a native English speaker is more likely to be monolingual while a native non-English speaker is more likely to be multilingual. (Obviously omitting ESL people as that's a given). When you think about it, in all the English based places I lived in being monolingual is seen as the norm, while on a global scale it is actually quite rare. It's either people who were in environments that require multiple languages to function, or if it's so rammed into school curriculum that people would have to get a taste on learning another language.

The truth is, people don't know how hard it is to learn another language until they have to actually do it. I'm not talking about "oh I went a Japanese class now I can kanichiwa", learning individual words is easy but many never ever went past that stage, and they seriously believe that if they can be truly correct in their mother tongue at the age of 8, then an ESL speaker who have learned English for 8 years must be at the same level; or somehow people can "double check" away their mistakes. In reality it doesn't work like that, at all.

I could easily be mistaken as English speaker orally, but my English grammar is still all over the place. While I haven't used my native language on regular bases for like what, 5 years? I can still pick it up in complete grammar correctness after a few minutes of warming up. Most grammar books out there are pretty useless anyway. One thing I can say for sure, us ESL users tend to not mess up apostrophes because that's the only thing in English grammar that stays consistent to its own rules.

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[ SECRET POST #1756 ]

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