erikao1o

I taught ESL for awhile, and I still tutor ESL at this time. My biggest pet peeve is when students do not capitalize the letter "i". Instead of writing "I" they write "i". An example of this is: "i walked to the store" instead of "I walked to the store". It drives me crazy!

Poetry breaks grammatical rules all the time! If you ever read anything by e.e. cummings, you will see that most if not all of his poetry breaks a lot of grammatical rules. In fact, his name does not even have any capital letters! You think that it would be spelt E.E. Cummings, but the correct way is with all lowercase letters.

I imagine that flirting in a foreign language can be very difficult! A lot of flirting relies on jokes, sarcasm, double meanings and even sometimes being a bit mean in a joking way. I speak French, but I don't know if I would be able to flirt in French. There is so much slang and sexual words that I don't understand, I feel as if I would be completely lost!

What an interesting question! I'm not sure what languages would be the most useful, but here are the five that I would choose. I chose English and French as I am a Canadian citizen, and both would be very helpful for me. 1. English 2. French 3. Spanish 4. Chinese, either Mandarin or Cantonese, I'm not sure which one is more useful 5. Arabic

I tend to call people something to do with a "bum", although I'm not sure if that qualifies as explicit or not! I tend to use "bumhead" and "bum" a lot when I am insulting someone. Although I do usually put an explicit word before I use the more appropriate one!

I get a lot of anxiety when I have to speak French too, so don't worry you're not alone! I find that the more you practice and the more you study, the more confidence you'll get in yourself. As an ESL teacher, I've encountered a lot of students who got anxiety or were too shy to speak English in front of me, due to the fact that I was a native English speaker. I would always try to get them to relax and remind them that I was there to teach them, and not to judge them. The more you speak a language, the better you get at it. It takes time, and there are some rude people who will simply be rude about it, try to ignore them and continue your quest for knowledge!

I would say I use an online dictionary at least once a day. I often come across words that I don't know the meaning of, and I can't stand not knowing what they mean! I also sometimes have to review the definition of a word before I use it, to make sure that I'm using it correctly.

My mom has this for Dutch. Her mom (my grandmother) was born in Amsterdam, so my mom grew up hearing Dutch all around her and visiting the Netherlands a hand full of times. She can now understand most of the conversations that are going on around her in Dutch, but she can't really speak the language. I've been trying to encourage her to study Dutch and learn how to speak and read it well, but she doesn't seem that interested!

I use so much slang when I'm talking to my friends! To a person who is just learning to speak English, how we talk would definitely be difficult to understand. A lot of the words we use have double meanings, and some things are even inside jokes. I can't imagine trying to listen to the crazy things we talk about!

Madame Bovary is definitely a classic. I remember reading in it my grade 12 French class, and unfortunately I found it to be very boring! I thought that the main character was totally un relatable and that the story moved at a very slow pace.

One I can think of is, "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse!" which means that someone is starving. When I was teaching ESL I taught my students "a piece of cake" which means that something is very easy. They loved using that idiom and would tell me how all of our work was a piece of cake!

I've heard that it's best to have children listen to different languages as early as possible. Children tend to have clearer and more authentic accents if they grow up listening to a foreign language being spoken by a native speaker. I've heard of parents putting on French or Spanish TV for their young children to listen to, which can help their child develop excellent accents.

It would definitely be helpful if there was a global language, it would be a lot easier for everyone to communicate with each other. Although it would be helpful, I don't think a global language will ever exist. People love their own languages too much, and languages are strongly linked to culture. I can't see people giving up their distinct cultures just to make communicating easier. I think that English is the closest we have to a global language at this point.

I think that it would be really interesting to study Latin. My high school didn't offer it, but another high school in my district did. I think it can be really helpful if you study any of the Romance languages, as they are based on Latin. It's definitely an interesting skill to have!

I think that everyone has a bit of shyness about them when they're learning a new language. I taught English in South Korea, and I found that a lot of my adult students and adults that I met were super shy about speaking English in front of me and making mistakes. I found that children were the exact opposite, they didn't care what mistakes they made at all! In the case of learning a new language, it would be great if we were all more like children!