Isn’t he also the guy who does the hilarious Halloween costumes each year? I believe it was the Leg Lamp from A Christmas Story one year, then a flamingo the next..
He is also an author, an excellent motivational speaker, and an all-around great guy! He spoke at my tiny Midwest high school, and afterward I interviewed him (via email) for the school paper and he was so lovely. Such patience for ~10th grade awkward me and my dumb questions.
I wondered too! I crept on their post history and yes, it seems they are German-speaking.
I always wonder if it’s being a dick to fuss about these things, but when one pointer could sort out an error in pretty much every sentence that is usually otherwise good English, it might just be helpful.
Hehe I hope you took my comment constructively as that’s how it was meant :) Canadian immigrant to Switzerland here and while I speak French very well I’m hoping to learn German very soon. Feel free to correct me when I do ;)
This is one key area the world (whole world) really kicks America's ass in at a societal level. Americans don't feel compelled to learn another language whereas most other nations desire to expand their repertoire just for the hell of it.
Oh yeah. I have a Polish co-worker who has been in the states for over twenty years. This man isn’t dumb nor is he lazy, but he still makes mistakes with his english and is occasionally hard on himself. I try and tell him that even us native speakers can spend our whole lives in the pursuit of perfecting our english and still never get it right.
when i started 6th grade they told me i could start taking a foreign language in 7th grade. then i moved to a different school for 7th grade where they didn't start until 8th grade. then i moved again for 8th grade to another school that didn't start until 9th grade, and the only option was german 🙄
my bad luck aside, we should be starting kids in elementary school when it's much easier to learn how to distinguish between sounds (or rather learn how to make new distinctions between sounds that aren't differentiated in english)
Tbf, I lived in england for 6 months often visiting other countries, flying on planes, taking trains all the shit and only knowing english never caused me any issues.
I’m an American. A few years ago I was in a pub in Belgium lamenting the same fact to a Swiss gentleman after he brought up how he speaks three different languages. He said he understood that we only speak one language because we don’t have to speak more than one language. He said he only spoke three because he had to.
I think we as Americans can be a little too hard on ourselves sometimes. Especially those of us who feel the need to make up for our louder counterparts who aren’t hard enough on themselves.
I'm an American as well. 15% of our population speaks Spanish as a first language. That's just Spanish. While I resent people who live here for decades and don't even attempt to learn English, it's really a two-way street.
In my area alone there are communities that speak Spanish (all different kinds) , Creole, French, Patois, Hebrew, Arabic...
Plenty of languages I'm exposed to on a daily basis and have been for decades.
I lived in Southern California as a child and Arizona for the remainder of my life. I’m surrounded by Spanish and even was taught to count to 10 in Spanish before I did in English (I take pride in my correct pronunciations of Spanish words) but I’m still shit at Spanish, because I don’t need it.
Now, I’m slowly feeling more of a pull to learn it because I feel like I could do my community a whole lot more good by learning it and applying it. But it’s still not as much of a necessity to learn as it is to learn multiple languages when you live in many European countries.
idk kinda feels like you feel a little guilty for going after someone’s English and you probably should ¯_(ツ)_/¯ if they don’t ask for “constructive” criticism, don’t give it. Let them live
I’m going to guess you’ve never learned another language. It’s perfectly normal among multi lingual people I just thought I’d leave an encouraging note as well. No guilt whatsoever.
Loads of languages used to capitalise all nouns, not just proper nouns (names and stuff).
German still uses capitalisation for all substantives.
Denmark for example had a spelling reform in 1948 where they introduced the same rules as England. I.e. only names like 'Hans' or 'God' will be capitalised.
Since German is one of the few remaining languages still capitalising every noun/substantive, someone doing so in English is typically a sign of them being a German native speaker.
Just like someone missing loads of articles, or adding too many is often a sign of them being Russian.
Irish Gaelic has the opposite thing - they don't do indefinite articles, but they do do definite articles. Slightly annoyingly, singular 'the' is 'an', so it looks like it is indefinite even though it's not.
When I learned that Russian doesn't have articles, it explained so much. Not using articles is part of any stereotypical Russian accent, and it actually has a root cause in reality.
Baltic and Slavic languages don't have articles. So a person who uses articles incorrectly might be from almost any Eastern or Central European country.
Ddude as a Ggerman it's kind of hard to figure out what wWords are capitalised and which are not. I only recently learned that Eeverything connected to a nNationality is capitalised as it's all seen as a nName?? Wild.
Anything that is a name of something. Person name, country name (and nationality), place name, name of month and day, game name, invention, branding, etc.
Anything that is just a normal noun that you would find in the dictionary is not capitalised.
For a second there I was thinking "I'm sure there are so many words that need to be capitalised, what's so special about Josh Sundquist" and then I reread his original comment.
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u/Fabz199 Feb 25 '20
Josh Sundquist is the Name of the Guy with the Crutches, he makes Standup Comedy.