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Comment by teknologist | Hacker News Reader

While living in China I've met several postgrads who studied in the UK or US but speak only pidgin English at best. How did they get through it? With money and copious amounts of cheating, probably.

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While criticizing someone else's English it's almost guaranteed you'll make an error of your own. It's 'pidgin English', not 'pigeon'.

Fixed, thanks. To be clear I'm actually criticising their ability to get a point across in a language they claim to speak and have studied with at degree level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law

Sometimes known as "Skitt's Law". http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/skitt-s-law

No no it's pinyin English :-)

I upvoted you, but the comma after 'pidgin English' should really go inside the quote. i.e.

    It's 'pidgin English,' not 'pigeon'.

http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/punctuating-around...

That's a style choice, and one that's largely rejected by this audience because we're used to logically nested programming languages.

We're also used, I hope, to juggling multiple types of syntax in the same project. This is no different.

Yes, and if the person you replied to were writing an academic article for the American Psychological Association they would be wise to follow their style guide in that context.

APA style is used far beyond psychology, and is one of the three most common styles of writing, the other two being MLA and Chicago.

That is correct, but I believe you meant 'e.g.' rather than 'i.e.': http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/ie-versus...

(If someone can spot an error I've made, this can go on forever. Wheee!) ;-)

No, their use of 'i.e.' was correct.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html

Your source mentions that there are several punctuation styles and 'single quotes' + 'comma outside' corresponds to the British style.

I sometimes work with a PM in China who studied (recently!) four years in the UK. His English is so bad that I have to disect a sentence I utter to him completely and test every part every time to know if he even understood. How does that work indeed? How did he surive there? I cannot ask him for obvious reasons.

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