Re: [gentoo-user] OT: top quotes, html mail, and binary jokes

[Holly Bostick]

Antoine schreef:
>>
>> Indeed, life is harder for those of us who don't have English as
>> first language.
>>
>>> kashani, still trying to get his German, Spanish, and Farsi up to
>>>  speed
>
> Can you imagine how hard it is to learn another language when
> everyone wants to speak English to you?

We used to complain about this *all the time* at Taalschool (the
year-long Dutch as A Second Language course that is required by the
government as part of the conditions for granting a Permit of Stay).

Many of us lived with Dutch people (certainly those of us who were in
the country because we were married to one), and of course that means
family and neighbors and other contacts who were native Dutch
speakers... but we found it universally difficult to get said native
speakers to help us by speaking Dutch (preferably slowly), or (heaven
forfend) helping us with our homework and the like, because they all
wanted to improve or show off their English/Russian/French. Of
course it's tiring for everyone, trying to have a conversation and
having the subject under discussion interrupted by constant grammatical
correction, and it's not really helpful to hold said conversations in
the "other" language for purposes of clarity, but often necessary when
new to the second language. But it was clear to us that the amount of
practice time we were getting from our 'aces in the
hole' was far less than could be explained by those excuses.

We all found it very frustrating. Of course, now that I have a fair
working knowledge of Dutch, my personal Dutchman helps me a lot more.
Can't say I don't appreciate it, but I could have used the help more two
years ago.

I suspect that this expectation of (to my mind, rather excessive)
self-reliance is common across Europe, though the Dutch may be a bit
stricter about it than other European cutural groups.

So once you get over the 'novelty hump', it should get better :-) .

Holly
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