Bad spelin'

Not at my school though, they won't even start with reading if it was in textspeak. I'm also no master with words but atleast I do my best to keep it readable.

Gwyn Dutch is much harder then you think, my stephmom comes from another country and if she explains you what her problems are with our language it's quite logical that it's hard to understand but it comes to us natural.
There are just little nacks in our language that's so hard to master since there arent a real rules for them.

You can only say that you have mastered Dutch if you can have a discussion with us in our own language.

What's your first language Gwyn, your English is so correct and you know a lot about it.

What second language do you english members needed to learn at schoool?
I needed to learn Enlish, French and German on school so I'm curious if you know more then only English.

Edit: here is a bid about our language if you're interesting, just to show that English isn't that hard link

Unfortunately it doesn't; what you have done is to paraphrase the sentence by removing both nots. A double negative when corrected would retain one of them.

The Wikipedia article on 'Double negative' contains this comment which may help to clarify the situation:

"There isn't a day when I don't think about her." – Prince William, speaking of his mother.

(This is not double negative, since the two negatives are in different clauses. A true double negative would be "there isn't no day when..." The sentence as spoken could only be changed by removing one of the negatives to either "There isn't a day when I think about her" or "There is a day when I don't think about her" neither of which has the intended meaning.)

Note the comment about clauses, a point I had already referred to.

Of course the sentence which started this debate could have been written with two double negatives: "I ain't talking about no people who don't speak no English neither". Or would that be two and a half?

Michael

Blimey Stefan you have it hard in Holland!

Now I know why you Dutch are so good at foreign languages, over here in the UK we were lucky to be taught French as a second language.

Modern schools seem to skip anything but English until students are 10 or 11 years old, then it's too late to learn them easily!

Mais je prefere Francais pour une deuxieme langue.

But I do tend to speak it better than I can type it, and my spell checker is only in English.

There are times I wish I had kept my mouth shut!

Sorry Dave but my French is the worst of all the languages, my Japanese is even better

You're saying something like that you prefer French as second language, if I'm correct. I only had it for a year and that was a long time ago.

I got my first English lesson at the age of 6 or 7, German at the age of 11 or 12 and French a year later. I still have a form of English lessons on school and I'm 22 now so do the math, German for 3 years and 1 year of French.

I learnt most of my French drinking good wine in France with, well, French people.

After the umpteenth bottle we were all speaking Franglais though!

Bring on the holidays and a trip across the water...

La prochaine fois que tu demandera des informations, je me ferai un plaisir de te répondre en Français. Ou, peut-être, en Espagnol...

Is good spelling necessary? Read the following-

Food for thought.

Saying that, it is nice to see our language used properly. My personal bee in the bonnet is apostrophe abuse.

Now to that I must plead lack of education AND lazyness.

Stefan, I'm British, but I've lived here for 25 years. Having three kids attending Dutch school was a great incentive to learn the language, though I still wasn't as quick at it as them! But I soon got to understand what their new friends wanted, and what mischief they were up to.

I'm not perfect at Dutch and have an English accent still of course, but I can have long angry conversations with the Ziggo helpline in Dutch so I can't be too bad

I speak English with my husband, unless I can't remember the English word . He's English and his Dutch is pretty grim, spoken with a broad Lancashire accent) Mostly I speak Dutch with my sons as two have Dutch partners, and one a German partner, who also speaks Dutch. Luckily if we do slip into English they can all follow the conversation and join in in Dutch.

Dave, that's a great way to learn French.
If you want to learn German would you then do it with some beer?


Gwyn, I thought it was something like that you already have told it once I believe but couldn't remember

It's quite hard to learn to speak Dutch here, when we hear that someone is struggling a bit we immidately switch to English, surely if we hear the accent. I think we do that much too fast and it must be quite annoying if you want to learn it.
If you would be in another country were you wouldn't come so far with English you will learn the language much faster, it's the perfect way to learn it really.

Any luck with Ziggo, we got UPC here but they arent any good either.

(All done without a spellings checker so please check the spelling and grammer if you want, I need to learn afterall )

Cineva vorbiti Romanesti?

As regards Oggy's post, the second half of that piece of research is that badly punctuated sentences are difficult to follow and understand. Without fullstops and capital letters etc. it is hard to break the words down into meaningful phrases. As an ex-typographer I get vexed that people misuse hyphens, en-rules and em-rules!

As to double negatives, the problem is that if you take them literally, the meaning is different to the intended one. "I don't want no bananas" actually means, "yes, I'd love bananas" whereas it was probably intended to mean "I don't want bananas". Many languages, however, require the use of a double negative. Thus, in Romanian "nu vreau nimic" literally translates as "I do not want nothing" but means "I do not want anything". Just to add to the confusion, if one says "You don't want to go to the shops, do you?", the answer in English would be "no" meaning "No, I don't want to go to the shops". In Romanian, the answer would be: "Yes" meaning "Yes, I do not want to go to the shops". Confused? You soon will be...

I'll now stand back and allow people to correct my grammar.

Stefan... I once accidentally said in Romanian, when offered a second slice of cake: "No thank you, I am very annoyed" instead of "No thank you, I am full." Luckily, the lady laughed and corrected me. The dictionary had given two alternatives for the verb "to have had enough" without differentiating between their meanings!

Yes, and good local German wine!

We're visiting a small guest house in the Middle Rhine region again this year, trouble is they speak good English so things deteriorate after a bottle or two.

I've tried Swedish with homebrew in Falkenberg, Can't remember much from that apart from a great evening with really good friends.

This all reminds me of a Two Ronnies sketch. Unfortunately I can't remember much of it but it was about teaching germans to speak English.

V F N 10 E X - was one of them. Any guesses?

Say what you see, fast.

I recall it as Teach Yourself Swedish and the dialogue was on the lines of:

F U N E T?
V F N N E T
F U N E M?
V F M.
F U N E X?
V F X.
OK, M N X.

Except it was something other than T.