Hi there!
This is a very unusual topic. I want to show you an english dialogue (which i wrote).
I'm 17 years old and i am from Germany. In school we had to present english dialogues with teams of 3 students. Last week a few friends of mine presented their dialogue. The language was almost perfectly right. But the content was a bit strange, but still the language was on a comperatively high level. But only because of the content the teacher gave my friends only 11 points (mark: 2-). Just because the teacher thought the content was "a bit weird". That sucks!
And that's why i want to pay back. Next week i will have to present my dialogue. I want to do a dialogue which shows the teacher how stupid this is. Therefore it's absolutely neccassery that the dialogue is linguistically perfect! Because this is the only big forum with hopefully many native english speakers i want you to read my dialogue and tell me if there are any mistakes or things that sound bad (from the linguistical point of view). Please, i need you help!

http://www.rgbnet.de/stuff/text/english_dialogue.html

That was one of the weirdest things I've read in a while. Here's 2 things that didn't sound quite right.

Should be life

It would be better to say "You're really not as stupid as you look" here

Thank you very much!

I'm aware of the "weirdness" of this dialogue.

Additionaly there is one sentence where i'm not sure about:


I want to say that the teacher should rather rate the way we speak and our style.
Is "estimate" the right word for "rating" as a teacher? And is "linguistically achievement" right?
I found no other English word which has the same meaning as the German word "Leistung".


Thanks a lot everyone (especially funkatron) who helps me, even if this is weird. ^_^

I would go with: "I will end my life" here rather than use the word finish. Although technically synonyms... this is a collocation (how is that for big stupid words for big stupid concepts?)... which basically means, it is something which is traditionally said one way and not the other. An example of the same thing is "red, white, and blue" for describing the colors of the American flag but never "blue, red, and white."

I hope my rambling makes sense there.

The primary problem, word tense. "linguistically" is the adverb form of the word and you want the adjective. Use linguistic instead (as we are describing the achievment and not doing something linguistically).

I would probably change the whole thing to, "And by the way, shouldn't you be grading us on our linguistic achievments?"

Note: I naturally went for the plural achievments but this might not be "technically" correct. Let me look into that.

You know what, you have interested me... I'll go and read the whole thing (I was just reading the segments included in the thread) and see if there is anything else I want to comment on.

English is a strange language. But keep it up. You've done well. Not all native speakers of English realize how tough it can be sometimes: somewhat like how long-time Linux users can assume too much knowledge in a newbie.

Some of those sentences sound weird but are technically grammatically correct. Just the usage of the words are "not quite right" in context in some places.

Just typos.

OR

Okay, some changes I would make... all in bold (note, I bolded the last character if I just deleted some things).

I am also not real certain about:
Although I don't see anything wrong with it, I am not sure it sounds "natural."

BTW: Very creative writing. I liked reading it.

It's cool. I had fun with it . And english is a very hard language too... I use english everyday, both writing, reading and talking with friends and relatives (I'm not a native speaker, mind you) and I am still not as good as I wish I was...

God bless the Spell Check button

'As I wish I were...' Megaman

--Shade

Thanks a lot guys!

In the end i had one mistake, "linguistical".
I read too late that this was wrong. But actually i should have seen it earlier by my self.
At least this was the only mistake my teacher recognized.
But he understood what i wanted to say and therefore he was a little bit pissed. And that was exactly what i wanted to create. Because that's the same feeling that the students had when they got bad marks just because of "weird" content.

I'm really grateful. At first i wondered if anybody would give an answer at all.
English is not as easy as it looks like. I keep studying... ^^

I had to do something similar in my Spanish class. We had to write this long story in spanish, and everyone wrote wierd and strange stuff.(although our spanish wasn't very good either)

nvm

Learning different languages is interessting but also very funny. Of course you are producing
a lot of crap, but isn't there a slogan: "Learning by doing."?

By the way, in Germany, at least at my school, we have to learn 2 foreign languages (English and Russian).
At the moment there is an Australian exchange student at our school and he told us that in Australia they don't have to
learn _any_ foreign language if they don't want to. I think learning different languages is very important, even if I hate the Russian language.

I have to disagree with all those who say English is a hard language. Although prouncing and spelling English can be hard. It does have 4 big advantages over many other languages :-
1) One gender
2) No cases
3) Modal verbs. Eg the future for to go in English is I will go she will go etc. But in Spanish there is no modal verb and so you have to learn different forms of the verb.
4) No subjunctive


I realise that not all other languages eg Danish do not have disadvantages (2) ,(3)and (4) but all have disadvantage (1).
What do you think Ictus ? Which is harder Russian or English ?

Also of course if you go to other countries even if you want to practise your language skills they speak to you in English !
BTW English is my first language but I also speak Spanish, Portuguese, Danish (rusty) and am learning Russian (so difficult).

Over here in america(well at least in my state anyway) we are required to learn 2 languages also, although we can pick. Currently i am taking spanish, and then i will be taking german.


That is true, but english also has the craziest use of tenses ever, and it is one of the hardest languages to conjugate.

In spanish almost every verb has an obvious conjugate. ie.

apago
apagas
apaga
apagamos
apagan

and all ar verbs have endings like that.

in english it would be like

I run
he/she runs
they run
we all run
they run

you would think that they would be plural, but it is not, and that is a hard concept to grasp.

Also you have

I am running
he/she is running
they are running
we all are running
they are all running.

where in all of the runs are conjugated exactly the same even though they are all conjugated for different people.

Why Mohammed? A gay couple won't give such name to their child. And such relationship is not allowed in Islam. You're just creating religious issue there.