Woo, another post!
I’d like to dedicate this post to a Thread on reddit:
No, i’m not sorry for my bad english.
This thread, or post is made by a 16 year old German kid who’s annoyed with the grammar-Nazis all over the internet.
Now, as a Norwegian I’ve got an unfair advantage over him. English is a part of the curriculum as of first grade, And we’re subbing films rather than dubbing them. This helps a lot, but even with this, if you lack motivation, you won’t learn much. Languages isn’t my strongest subject, I’ve got Es in Norwegian(2), Spanish(2) and French(2), but an A(5) in English. Now, that shouldn’t make much sense, since I’m speaking Norwegian daily and my English isn’t that good, If it weren’t for the fact that teacher’s aren’t expecting fluent English (Did this sentence make any sense?). So how come that I, who isn’t exactly good at languages, can write quite decent English? Blame Japan.
Until I was eleven, I failed every single English glossary test, all my English understanding came from watching “Friends”, and that wasn’t much. Then I discovered Naruto.
Naruto was awesome. At first I downloaded the latest episodes from naruto-central, and watched them without much context and understanding. If there was a word I didn’t understand I’d google it. These episodes were subbed btw. It didn’t take long until my grades improved. I began reading the manga, and watch the older naruto episodes, and Bleach. Now I had a fair understanding of english and I had figured out the “syntax” of the language, by that I mean that even though I didn’t know the exact word I could understand it by context and the feeling the word had.
Here’s where tribal-wars come in. Ironically, since Tribalwars is a German game. But I began playing on Tribalwars.net when I was about 13-15 years old. I joined the latest server at that time, World 8. I played for about a month before I got owned. I didn’t really have any understanding of the game. Then I joined World 9. I was in a top tribe for quite a while, but I still didn’t understand the game, But through that time I had Loads of interaction with other players. I began learning words such as “Lenient” and how to spell attack and defence right, but that was because of the genius dictionary inside of Firefox.
I then joined World 11. I started my own tribe. This would become my success-story, even though I had no clue how to play the game. I’ve must have been a good leader, because we grew, and I became friends with so many Intelligent people, twice my age and skill, who still followed me. I was extremely proud of my tribe and family. It took all my time though, and I had to quit because I forgot to eat and such. It ended with me passing out on my way to school. It was at that time my English skill peaked, I began to think in English. If I couldn’t remember a Norwegian word, I would know the English equivalent right there and then.
I began actually to write this blog to keep some of the English vocabulary, to keep it maintained. And I am ten times better at writing English than speaking it, I did some wiring on a sound system at school for some Brits who where performing, and I had troubles saying the complicated word: “yes” to them. I really struggled when I asked if they had any duct tape (which i go the response:” Oh, Gaffa?”). My point is that I suck Orally (ಥ‿ಥ).
Common mistakes I know I do: Have vs Had, Were vs where, got vs gotten (I use “obtained” as much as possible) I can’t remember more atm.
Anyway, Hope you have a nice day, please follow me if you find rare, long and quite uninteresting posts, appealing, until next time ^^,
