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Why lie about native English speaker? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6337 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 1 of 43 04 July 2011 at 7:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think it's really cool that there are so many non native English speakers who could pass for native on this site. But
I wonder about the ones who can't, but still make the claim. Is it some sort of challenge? Does it push you to a higher level? I hope you keep on doing it, because it's just one more thing that makes this board interesting. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5798 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 43 04 July 2011 at 9:50am | IP Logged | |||||
It would be better if they stopped, because learners try to copy the patterns used by natives, and if people with bad English claim to be native... well, it's just not fair on the others. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6490 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 43 04 July 2011 at 10:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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Two remarks:
1) It is difficult for me to see why anybody would want to hide their true native language. I can - with some difficulty - understand why some people want to pretend that they are perfectly fluent in a secondary language, but why hide the one and only language which they really should know well? 2) In principle you should be able to judge from the types of errors whether a certain writer is a native Anglophone or not, but given that you can grow up in a non-Anglophone environment in an Anglophone country, given that native Anglophones may have lived abroad for a long time AND that some persons simply can't express themselves in writing in any language then there will inevitably be natives who can't write like natives. Edited by Iversen on 04 July 2011 at 12:25pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Saim Pentaglot Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4870 days ago 124 posts - 215 votes Speaks: Serbo-Croatian, English*, Catalan, Spanish, Polish Studies: Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Occitan, Punjabi, Urdu, Arabic (Maghribi), French, Modern Hebrew, Ukrainian, Slovenian | Message 4 of 43 04 July 2011 at 10:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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Shouldn't that read "Why lie about being a native English speaker?"?
4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| w1n73rmu7e Newbie United States Joined 5727 days ago 31 posts - 46 votes | Message 5 of 43 04 July 2011 at 12:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
Edited by w1n73rmu7e on 04 July 2011 at 12:03pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6490 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 43 04 July 2011 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The Google test:
"being fair on": 204.000 hits "being fair to": 4.620.000 hits .. though some of those hits represent non-native bunglers (like me). Apart from that: our languages would become poor indeed if we only used the most common constructions in all cases. Kudos to Cainntear for confirming that "being fair on" is possible. The misleading syntax in leosmith's original question is caused by a limitation on the length of thread titles. Edited by Iversen on 04 July 2011 at 12:24pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5121 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 43 04 July 2011 at 12:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have several times been surprised to see people claim to be native in languages where they make a lot of mistakes. My personal favourite was the one who claimed to have 7 native languages, 2 of which were dead languages.
I do not know why people think it gives them more prestige to claim to be native in more languages than their actual one. I would think it has more merit to have learned a language to near native level, with the effort and talent which that involves, than just to have learned it growing up. And anyone who finds spelling errors or other mistakes in this post is free to keep them :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Biscuit Diglot Newbie Norway Joined 4688 days ago 11 posts - 12 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 8 of 43 04 July 2011 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To me being mistaken for a native is the highest form of praise, so I quite understand why people would strive to reach that level. I still wouldn't make that claim myself, and when native speakers have chatted with me long enough they too will no doubt discover the shibboleths that reveal my Scandinavian origin :)
What I don't understand is why anyone would claim to sound native if it wasn't true but I guess lots of people exaggerate their skills not just when it comes to languages. Edited by Biscuit on 04 July 2011 at 1:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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