So I used to have a Russian friend who had a pretty thick accent and like a lot of Russians tended to eschew articles. She would say things like “Get in car.” And stuff.
Well one day this asshole who had been kind of tagging along with us asks her why she talks like that because it makes her sound dumb and I still remember her response word for word.
“Me? Dumb? Maybe in America you have to say get in THE car because you are so stupid that people might just get in random car, but in Russia we don’t need to say that. We just fucking know because we are not stupid.”
One time I was proof reading a paper for a Russian student. As I was correcting her paper with her, the many mistakes in her grammar started weighing on her. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, almost sobbing,
“In Russian I am so intelligent and clear. In English I am like [an] idiot”
Respect to anyone trying to master a foreign language. I get so sad thinking about that student.
Full offense but people who make fun of someone else’s accent or belittle their limited vocabulary when they’re speaking a language not native to them are fucking disgusting and are just begging to be punched.
They’re speaking your language because you don’t know theirs. That’s not something they should be made fun of, it’s something that should be commended because learning a language is hard fucking work.
I hate people who do this so much.
Fluency in a language isn’t the ability to speak it 100% clearly with perfect grammar and no accent. It’s the ability to speak and understand words and phrases, to have yourself be understood, and to understand nuances. An Indian man who speaks English with a heavy accent isn’t any less fluent than a Scotsman speaking English with a heavy accent. You’re just choosing to be ignorant and racist about it.
I worked in my college’s writing center in the US, and I worked a lot with international students. In particular, one my friends came in a bunch, and we ended up working together. My friend is Korean, and obvi insanely smart, but she had trouble with articles/small filler words while writing. But she didn’t have any trouble with this when speaking. So, when she came in and we got to work together, she’d read her paper out loud and catch 99% of those mistakes herself. It wasn’t me correcting her, but sitting with her while she corrected herself. Because she knew that shit but it’s hard when writing. And so she’d leave much happier, knowing that she did the work herself but that someone else was there just in case she missed something on her own.
tldr: people know shit, let them figure it out on their own, and offer the support that they seek, and be a friend
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