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Claiming to Speak a Language - Pet Peeve | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 161 of 164 26 March 2013 at 7:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I tend to take claims with a grain of salt. But it's not my job to play inspector Gadget.
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| vilas Pentaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6961 days ago 531 posts - 722 votes Speaks: Spanish, Italian*, English, French, Portuguese | Message 162 of 164 26 March 2013 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Maybe, when they want pick some girl 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tennisfan Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5361 days ago 130 posts - 247 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish Studies: German | Message 163 of 164 04 April 2013 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't know how widespread it is, but I've seen a couple of cases of this happening where it goes beyond personal interactions and into the professional language teaching world, which is worrying.
Just as a quick example: I don't want to give too many details, but I have a friend who is from a former Soviet satellite country. She's young-ish, late 20s. She has a masters degree in English, and after searching for some time, found a job a few months ago in her home city, at a language school, teaching English. The problem is: her English is really not that good. In fact, I'd go so far as to saying it's actually quite poor for someone who teaches English. Her conversational skills are the worst, I'd say that it would be quite generous to say she speaks at about A2. She can carry on basic conversation but nothing much more than that. I suppose in terms of writing, identifying basic grammar errors on paper, etc, she uses English at a higher level, but in terms of actually expressing herself in conversation she really is still almost a beginner. In fact she's never visited an English speaking country and her learning material was all 1980s sources. She says things like "Good afternoon, pal," followed by "what's kicking?" in a very deliberate and awkward way. And yet, she gets paid to teach English to other people! She's a very good person, warm, kind, intelligent. But I really feel bad that some students are learning English from her. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 164 of 164 05 April 2013 at 2:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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And she must've had some of the best classes available... that's why I'm sceptic of them.
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