Gelsemium

I am not planning on learning any new language anytime soon, but I do want to work on my English because I want to start making some translations and my English needs to be pretty accurate to do that. English - Portuguese is fairly OK, I don't know if any non-native will ever be able to translate into English, opinions differ.

I am arriving late to this discussion, but still answering to the first post I have to say that TV love to invent new words, they probably think they are entitled to it or simply they don't know better and they cause a lot of impact because they say it on TV.

Fluffy, could care less meaning could not care less right? Yep, it's a total different meaning!

I am not an accent expert. I do know there is the British accent, the most famous one I think, but then I don't know if some words I say are in the "american" or the UK way. I watch a lot of TV and I think that most contents are from the US, so probably my English should have an American accent.  :nerd:

@Kate, You think Esperanto is an easy language to learn? But why would anyone want to learn Esperanto?

Comparing to French for example, I think the English structure is far easier and despite of what you say Denis, I think that the level of exposure does help a lot, you become familiar with certain sounds and words, so I think it's easier.

Denis, you were exposed to Chinese, but were you studying it as well?

I don't think it's an antithesis. 'Propose' and 'dispose' aren't antonyms. 'Propose' in this case means to put forward an idea or a plan, while 'dispose' is to decide what happens. Doing some further reading, this proverb is actually a translation from "The Imitation of Christ", and puts forth the notion that God ultimately decides a man's success or failure no matter what. As such, I would say my answer is a) hypothesis.

I agree with your argumentation, but I reach a different conclusion, I'd say it's a thesis because "Man proposes, God disposes." is the proposition of a thesis, the one that man proposes and god disposes.

Eudora, do you have a correct answer for this test? I am glad I was not the one taking it!  :grin:

Thank you for sharing your story tinytinsparrow, I think it's a great quote you selected and I agree with what you say, nothing like setting small goals to see how we progress, huge goals sometimes make us believe we are doing nothing and that is not true!

There are many many quotes that I love, here's one that I find amazing:

"The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes." Thomas Hardy

Many non-native English speakers grow up surrounded by the English language (TV, movies, computers) and I think this makes it easier for most of us to learn. Apart from that we also learn pretty early (age 5 or 6) to learn it and, let's face, it's a pretty simple language and grammar. Having this said, is English the easiest language to learn? Or not?

Indeed, it took me a while to understand what's going on in that video! I think that English, German, French or other language sounds pretty much the same to a person that doesn't speak that particular language, a little like a song on the radio or our voice to a dog, we just make an interpretation of the tone of voice and that's pretty much it.

I know exactly what you mean sos as I had some French at school years ago, but I never really practiced it and the result is that I can understand more or less what people say, but if I want to speak it I cannot, nothing comes out of my mouth, it's really frustrating!

So, we need to practice speaking even if we understand a language, the more we practice, the better we speak.