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mr_dja
"Should have" is correctly contracted to "should've" which PHONETICLY in much of the USA is not far from "should of" which then got shortend (in slang) to "shoulda". I can't tell you how many times I've heard my grandfather and father use the phrase "Woulda, coulda, shoulda" when I gave them an excuse for not having done something.
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Aquamarine
as a teacher I used to have to spend hours and hours correcting it!
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Aquamarine
This is the trouble I have trying to learn Portuguese--words and sentences seem to be blurred into each other.
Dear Aquamarine, this goes for every foreign language:
That's what I said.
And the fact that it DOES apply to English too is what the whole "should a heard him" point was about.
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Aquamarine
Well, yes, because of the way I've seen people struggle with it, to be honest! You sound like you had a better experience.
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Big Al
I don't know whether any of my fellow Britons will agree with me here, but isn't it peculiar and, somewhat funny, how those English-speakers whom cannot claim English as a 'first language', actually speak the language more eloquently and more coherently than many of those born an bred in Great Britain? I sometimes struggle to understand the yokels - sorry, 'locals' - from my hometown, for instance.
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Aquamarine
Yes, I know, but as a teacher I used to have to spend hours and hours correcting it!
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owlbyniteQuote
Aquamarine
Yes, I know, but as a teacher I used to have to spend hours and hours correcting it!
All the bad spelling on this forum must drive you nuts!
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Aquamarine
Yes, I know, but as a teacher I used to have to spend hours and hours correcting it!
All the bad spelling on this forum must drive you nuts!
Spelling mistakes in general don't drive me nuts, not being perfect myself, but that one does, for some reason. I think it's because to use the word "of" in that context ("should of") just doesn't make sense!
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owlbyniteQuote
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Aquamarine
Yes, I know, but as a teacher I used to have to spend hours and hours correcting it!
All the bad spelling on this forum must drive you nuts!
Spelling mistakes in general don't drive me nuts, not being perfect myself, but that one does, for some reason. I think it's because to use the word "of" in that context ("should of") just doesn't make sense!
Doesn't all the bad spelling and grammar make you just want to jump in since that was your vocation?
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Aquamarine
Yes, I know, but as a teacher I used to have to spend hours and hours correcting it!
All the bad spelling on this forum must drive you nuts!
Spelling mistakes in general don't drive me nuts, not being perfect myself, but that one does, for some reason. I think it's because to use the word "of" in that context ("should of") just doesn't make sense!
Doesn't all the bad spelling and grammar make you just want to jump in since that was your vocation?
No, not really, thank goodness--I was a literature prof, so it was more a case of having to correct spelling/grammar, since accuracy really is important, but I was actually more interested in what people were saying. Like here.
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Mathijs
There's quite a difference between the way I speak English and the way a native English speaker speaks it though...In Holland we think we all speak English, but most of us are actually quite terrible at it.
But I find English, and Spanish and Portuguese for that matter, easyer to learn than Dutch, German and Scandinavian languages. Enlish is quite logical to me, with a limited set of grammer rules. If you know a decent amount of words you can make yourself understandable. With Dutch and German there's much more grammer cases and catagories, and certain things are not really based on rules but are mere the accepted way of grammer -we don't know why you have to say it like that, but you have to. That makes it difficult to learn.
Mathijs
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Big Al
Aquamarine, have you found that you're accent has 'softened' at all?
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kleermaker
but imagine it weren't the British but the Chinese or Arabs who 'conquered' the world, would we, all people not having Chinese or Arabic as their mother tongue, all speak, read and write as good Chinese/Arabic as we do English?
Impossible to know, but as we wouldn't have had a choice (any more than all those British colonies had a choice) it's kind of a moot point, really!
Well let me put it this way then: we, non English speaking people, learn English at school and from tv, movies etc, just like some of us learn French and German. Most of us here in Holland are much, much better in English than in German or French. But well, imagine you English-native-tongue-people would have Chinese or Arabic as a regular lesson at school. How do you think your command of (one of) those languages would be? I guess you'll have any idea about the answer. At least I do!
It's always said that the English are lousy at learning other people's languages - because our recent history has meant that most people have had to learn ours, so we don't have to bother. So we don't know how easy it might have been to learn Chinese or Arabic, because we haven't had to try.
But our earlier history was different. The Celts had to learn Latin as part of the Roman Empire, then we were invaded by Angles and Saxons (Germanic), then Vikings (Norse), then Normans (French). Then the intelligentsia learnt Latin and Greek again. Then we had waves of French, Irish and Jewish refugees and immigrants, and now we have Jamaican, Indian, Polish...
The point about English is that it's a mongrel language, with all its history showing in its vocabulary. Our legal system still speaks Norman-French, our scientific vocabulary is Latin/Greek. We are not purists like the French - if a word's useful, we adopt it, just like our favourite band listens to everything and puts it all into the music they make.
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Big Al
Aquamarine, have you found that you're accent has 'softened' at all?
Some of my British (i.e. English and Welsh!) friends think they can hear American overtones in my accent, but I think it's much the same as it always was, myself!
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Big Al
Aquamarine, have you found that you're accent has 'softened' at all?
Some of my British (i.e. English and Welsh!) friends think they can hear American overtones in my accent, but I think it's much the same as it always was, myself!
I guess it is possible that there are now some American overtones that have muscled their way into your accent, but perhaps it is the change in phrases and the Americanisms that you now use in everyday speak - presuming you say 'sidewalk' and not 'pavement' and 'bathroom' and not 'toilets' etc - that make your friends believe there has been a gradual blurring of your English accent.
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Big Al
Aquamarine, have you found that you're accent has 'softened' at all?
Some of my British (i.e. English and Welsh!) friends think they can hear American overtones in my accent, but I think it's much the same as it always was, myself!
I guess it is possible that there are now some American overtones that have muscled their way into your accent, but perhaps it is the change in phrases and the Americanisms that you now use in everyday speak - presuming you say 'sidewalk' and not 'pavement' and 'bathroom' and not 'toilets' etc - that make your friends believe there has been a gradual blurring of your English accent.
Could well be. It's true that I do speak American when I'm here, but I find I adapt to speaking British English--or at least English English--pretty quickly when I go over there. But I must slip up occasionally, and it makes more sense that it would be that more than my actual accent, which I really don't think has changed.
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Aquamarine
What if the toilet is in the bathroom?
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Big Al
I want to stray slightly off-topic and ask those in North America a question: when I get asked ‘is that a British accent?’ or, ‘I like your British accent’, do you literally mean ‘British’, or, in fact, ‘English’? It’s just that I cannot imagine an American asking someone with a Glaswegian accent whether they’re anything other than Scottish. They are - for the time being, anyway! - part of Great Britain. But why wouldn't one ask them if they have a 'British' accent?
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Aquamarine
Scotland is an English-speaking country (mostly) whose inhabitants sound nothing like the inhabitants of England, ditto Wales and Northern Ireland. Which of them has the "British" accent?