On Tuesday, 17 June 2014 at 04:03:23 UTC, 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).
Completely agree with Parker! And thanks for writing this down.
Matheus.
