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Best Places to Find Native Speakers | ||
Tags: Stereotypes | Native Speakers | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4598 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes  Speaks: Russian | Message 1 of 11 15 December 2011 at 6:21am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Having trouble finding native speakers in your target language? Here are some helpful tips on where you may have better luck finding them.
Spanish- Soccer stadium Soccer stadium construction site (U.S. only) French- Culinary schools Over-priced hair salons Portuguese- Amazon rainforest Amazon.com German- Oktoberfest Police sobriety checkpoints after Oktoberfest Russian- Mercedes car dealerships Going-out-of-business fur sales Arabic- Mosque (5 pm) Any nightclub featuring belly dancers (6 pm) Korean- Your local dry cleaner Your local school library Japanese- Your local karate school/ninja academy Boardroom of any American company Mandarin- Your local Chinese restaurant Your local top-secret science laboratory 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5235 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 2 of 11 15 December 2011 at 7:00am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Alternatively, "all of Germany".
Where I live, these would all be Spanish...
This isn't the 80's (thank God).
Probably the last place you'd go in Brazil to find Portuguese speakers... 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Carlucio Triglot Groupie BrazilRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4678 days ago 70 posts - 113 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishC1, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 11 15 December 2011 at 10:40am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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If you want to hear portuguese in US just go to Florida, there are a incredible number of brazilian tourists
there,inside best buy and wal mart you wont hear other language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5831 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 4 of 11 15 December 2011 at 11:26am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Hmmm... sometimes there's a fine line between "humour" and "racism".
The fact that most of us live in different countries from you means that we don't even have a shared frame of reference, so this isn't even funny. For instance, most Chinese restaurants in the UK are run by Cantonese speakers (as Hong Kong was formerly part of the British Empire). And in almost every country outside North America, football ("soccer") is the most popular sport imaginable, so any stadium will most likely be full of locals. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6417 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 5 of 11 15 December 2011 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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i'd call that nationalism rather than racism. not that one is "better" than the other.
some of these are funny though... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5082 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 6 of 11 15 December 2011 at 2:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Many people will click on this thread because of the title "Best Places to Find Native Speakers" expecting to find some useful help and instead will just find a list of language/ethnic stereotypes. To paraphrase @Cainntear, it is indeed a very fine line.
To those of you who actually want to meet native speakers for practice, there are many language exchange sites on the web for those who lack access to native speakers, conversationexchange.com and lenguajero.com for Spanish/English are two. For those who wish to meet native speakers face to face, there's meetup.com, couchsurfing.org, or there's always the old-fashioned way, just ask around your social/work/university network of people if anyone knows anyone who speaks "x" as a native language. You'll be surprised at who you will find if you just ask around for help. That's how I found people with whom to practice Portuguese here on a tiny island in the Caribbean- I asked around. Edited by iguanamon on 15 December 2011 at 2:40pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5154 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 11 15 December 2011 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Could we please, please, please, stop accusing eachother of racism every time we get the chance? I totally disapprove of racism too, but I am starting to get really tired of people trying to pin racism on someone at the slightes hint of an un-PC statement. How about just not contributing to the thread? Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 15 December 2011 at 3:30pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4950 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 8 of 11 15 December 2011 at 4:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm with Cainntear on this one. He's right that we don't all come from the same cultural references. One person's political incorrectness is another's offensiveness. I don't see anything wrong with pointing that out. R. == 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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