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> I blame the web for understanding (writing?) English as good as I do.

s/good/well/

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/good.html http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/good-versus-well.aspx

:)

I feared walking into a trap like that.

I should have listened to the words of the great thinker Tracy Jordan: “Nah-uh. Superman does good, you’re doing well. You need to study your Grammar, son.” :)

That said, those little quirks are another problem with feeling yourself into a language. I was constantly misusing the German „wie“ – “like” – when making comparisons. I would say something like „Pasta ist besser wie Pizza!“ (“Pasta is better like Pizza!”), not „Pasta ist besser als Pizza!“ (“Pasta is better than Pizza!”) because it just sounded correct to my ears.

I would never ever misuse “like” and “than” in English but I quite happily confused their German equivalents for quite some time.

Which made a lot of people squirm and caused them visible pain so I dropped it. That in itself wasn’t all that easy. Since no automatic red flag was raised when I misused “wie” I consciously had to search everything I said for “wie” and consciously detect whether I used it correctly. Which, in the beginning, was quite hard. I would blurt out a sentence with a blatant misuse, pause a second and hastily add “Oh! ‘Als’ not ‘wie’! ‘Als‘ not ‘wie’!” But I was successful in the end.

Re: Wie

For Norwegians learning German we have a similar problem.

The Norwegian "som" can be translated into "wie", "als", "der", "die", "das", welcher", "welches" or "welche".

At a guess you're from S. Germany right? Ich habe gesessen oder Ich bin gesessen?

I would be very, very grateful if you could email me (barry.p.cotter@gmail.com). I just moved to Germany and want to find out about doing vaguely computery or programming Praktika or news.yc equivalents in German.

s/good/good/

Good is good enough. I understand what he means.

Foreign learners shouldn't worry about proper English the way native speakers do.

Oddly enough I think some kinds of foreign learners end up _more_ worried about some aspects of written english than native speakers. Things like they're/there/their, affect/effect, it's/its etc are more likely to deceive someone who learned english orally than someone who did it by the web/as a second language.

At least, as a foreigner, it never ceases to amaze me that these things are even issues at all.

Its and it’s is easy for me but seems to be a big problem for many native speakers.

I think it might have something to do with translating. These "confusing" sets of words are translated as completely different things in portuguese. On the other hand, my high school teacher usually used "why" and "because" to explain the difference between "porque" and "por que" in portuguese (and she could, although she didn't, also use "the reason" as an analogy for "o porquê").

> Foreign learners shouldn't worry about proper English the way native speakers do.

Why not? Positive action? As a foreign learner, I don't want to be judged by lower standards. That would label me as "the French man"[1]. That would be a form of exclusion. That would lose me credibility.

Moreover, I am not judged by lower standards. In most contexts, people don't even know that I'm not native. They will judge me by natives' standards like I do you.

The catch is, I am not a native speaker. So, the only way to catch up is to worry more than native speakers. So I should. So I do.

[1] I once was told that unlike the Merovingian, Lambert seldom have a French accent, if at all. That he was upset when he was asked to fake it.

Foreign learners shouldn't worry about proper English the way native speakers do.

The average native speaker regularly makes this mistake, so I wouldn't say it's a big deal at all.

I'm norwegian and this pretty much sums up my experience. I have never studied english grammar and didn't really start reading a lot of it until I was around 16. From then on I mostly read english. I haven't really tested my english formally apart from getting As and Bs in High School but I think it's good, my reading comprehension is great. I dont think any intellectually curious (and young?) person needs anything more than an electronic dictionary and an access to the internet to learn it. The question is; can I do the same with chinese and spanish at 20?

Or German at 16. I teach high school German in Norway, and the kids don't hear/read enough German for immersion to work. We have 4 hours per week of classes, so memorization of vocabulary and grammar is fundamental. (but some combination with immersion is obviously very preferable)

But: There is no silver bullet. Take The Korean too with a grain of salt (but there is a lot of truth there)

Why not? The web is full of blogs about self-learning languages like mandarin or japanese and as for english, you'll find plenty of free material to enhance your learning experience. Also the average quality of today self-learning material seems to me to have improved a lot.

I see the age thing as something that should ease the process of learning a new language, a well educated adult should have the right mindset needed to try to optimize his learning experience leveraging available material and new techniques. I don't see why someone younger should have a easiest way while studying a new language... AFAIK the myth of languages being learned faster by kids has been debunked a decade ago.

And btw, if you are into mandarin, take a look into Michel Thomas audio-only course.

> Now, three years after I left school, I also really fear for my ability to speak English.

Don't. Like you, I seldom speak English for more than a year, now. (I do read, write in, and listen to English almost every day.) The only possible difference is that I often proofread myself aloud (well, whispering, actually).

Two days ago, I had surprise phone conversation in English. Switching my speech to "English mode" took me 5 second. After that, I was fluent again.

> I read quite a lot on the web and suddenly something snapped.

This happens in many fields where the method of thought is unnatural. I think it happens when we finally "grok" something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

>The German speaking part of the web to me seemed utterly boring,

I feel you, and also the German web ist full of grammar nazis, which is, admittetly, kinda funny. (Plus the mods in most forums seems to be on some sort of power trip)

I had the very same experience, down to the commas.

My English improved vastly when I started chatting online :D

Preach it brother!

Sadly, in my experience that worked for the first language, but not for the second. I guess my mind simply is not good enough anymore.