On 6/17/2014 1:03 PM, Mike Parker wrote:
On 6/17/2014 12:16 PM, Caligo via Digitalmars-d wrote:
My rant wasn't about his lack of fluency in the English language. You
only learn once what a sentence is, and the concept translates over to
most other natural languages. The same is true with the concept of
constructing a paragraph. Even if he's not a native English speaker,
I'm willing to bet that his writings in his mother tongue are just as
bad. Just ask professors how often they encounter poor quality
writings that were produced by native speakers. And FWIW, I'm not a
native English speaker either. I'm multilingual, and I don't use that
fact as an excuse for anything.
I completely disagree with all this. I've been teaching English (and
also Debate) in Korea for 20 years at all levels of ability, from
beginner to advanced. I've taught preschoolers, primary school students,
university students, housewives, laborers, office workers, teachers,
business executives and more. I also frequently edit documents that have
already been translated from Korean to English, cleaning them up to make
them more readable to native speakers. I can tell you without hesitation
that there are a great many people who write very well in Korean and
have a good spoken command of English, but who manage to construct some
unintelligible English sentences when they write. The ability to write
well in a native language and/or to speak well in a foreign language
does not translate to an equivalent ability in a foreign language
(particularly when there is an extreme difference in grammar between the
two).
"an equivalent ability *to write well* in a foreign language"
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