mickey4533

Back in elementary my teachers and parents would always attribute my growing grasp of English to books but I knew it was because of the TV shows and movies played a tremendous part. American culture in general has has taught me more English than books and teachers have.

Definitely a private tutor as it provides you with much more practice than you would get in a class. In the end, practice is all that counts. You can spend as much time studying grammar rules etc but nothing provides you with a better grasp of the language than practice.

I usually reserve correcting people only when it is needed to be able to understand what they are sayng, unless the other person is someone who  know would prefer to know the correction. The exception is when the person being corrected is a jerk who needs a comeuppance.

Exactly, why bother correcting it if you can understand them perfectly? Also, if it's something that would be embarrassing I would tell them so it wouldn't happen to them again.

I over use it. My favorite text is, lol haha. I use that in almost every text. It doesn't even have to be funny for me to use it. It is almost like its instinct or a habit. Sometimes I will notice and think, "hmm, I just lied, because I really didn't laugh out loud".

Yeah, I often use it even when it's not a funny situation. It just seems to roll off the tongue. I even say it sometimes instead of texting. It sounds ridiculous but still.

Nope, English is actually my third language. But I learned it at a pretty early age so it was pretty easy for me.

Trilingual here . I speak English, Mandarin and Thai fluently. I also speak Japanese but I'm not that fluent at it. However, I cant read and write as proficiently for Mandarin and Thai compared to English.

I think phrases is more useful since you can actually use them in everyday life. And I believe that communicating is the easiest way to learn a language. When there's actually a practical use for it, you feel more encouraged to use it.

Yeah, like the people above me said, I don't think you have to be extremely fluent to be considered bilingual. I speak three languages to the point that I can communicate with people efficiently and I consider myself trilingual.

I'd love to learn Spanish since I'm living near the border to Mexico and there are many people that speak Spanish here. I feel like it would be really useful in everyday life.

I'm better with this at Asian languages, I can easily recognize when people are speaking Korean or Cantonese even though I've never spoken either. However, I have no way of telling European languages apart.

I tried this with Japanese before but it was rather difficult. Even the slow songs are way too fast for me to keep up. The only way this could be effective is by reading the lyrics but then it wouldn't really be learning through music.

Yes, I'm totally guilty of this. I find that many people use it when they aren't sure of how they're supposed to reply to the message. I find myself doing that too. When I'm not completely sure what my friends are talking about or unsure of how I'm supposed to reply I just use LOL.

It depends on how prepared I feel. I'm usually pretty confident if I covered all the content taught. However, I do stress out a lot before exams that I can't prepare for, such as the SAT. I find that I always walk in feeling more confident after a good night's sleep though.

My favorite quote is "Man in the Arena" by Theodore Roosevelt. It's really long so I wont post it here but basically it describes how it's not the critic that matters but instead it's the man who is actually in the arena doing things. It praises the man of action instead of the man sitting around passively judging others.

I find it weird how teachers in highschool always tell you not to start sentences with conjunctions but in real life it's actually perfectly acceptable. I find nothing wrong with starting my sentences with "but" especially when it's already a really long sentences. It feels like it would make things easier on my readers.

I'm an incredibly slow reader. Often times when reading something with a friend they'll finish the page way before me and they'd have to wait for about a minute or two before I finished. I have a bad habit of going back and rereading a section even if all I missed was one word. I end up rereading pretty the whole thing a couple times.

I don't really understand what the purpose of kanji is. Can't we just use hiragana for it? It seems like it's a lot of effort for no real purpose. It seems like it would save so much time to just use hiragana and katana for everything.

What do you think?

I've used google translate a fair amount as I've studied four languages. I find that it is way more developed for some languages than others. For example, if I'm simply translating words instead of phrases in Mandarin its usually pretty accurate.

I often have trouble spelling the word "restaurant". Even though its such a simple word and we use it all the time, somehow I still manage to spell it wrong every other time.

I grew up in a country where English isn't the native language. So often times when students from countries with English as their native language arrive, they feel the need to correct our English. Honestly, it gets really frustrating after awhile. I think as long as your English is understandable, there should be no need to correct it.

Rarely if ever do I use proper English when speaking with my friends. We shorten almost every word until it almost seems like a completely different language. It's really fun but sometimes I wonder if it makes my English skills deteriorate.