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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jon_Dahl" data-source="post: 5478628" data-attributes="member: 89822">There are a few things in this world that will never make you a hero. Such as eating glass, jumping off a bridge or learning English.Writing to message boards and living one year in Ireland has shown me that people who speak English as a native language tend to be real douchy to people who've learned it as a second language. I've tried to analyze why is it like that. Some possibilities come to my mind:- These people don't understand what it's like to learn a new language, so they don't appreciate it.- They hate seeing or hearing anything else than perfect and natural English. Any deviation from this will distract them.- It's their hard way to encourage people to learn more and speak better.Well one thing that I do know is that this is cultural. For the past three years I've studied Brazilian Portuguese and I speak it like a retard. But still it was an amazing experience to travel to that beautiful country and the people really appreciated that I had learned Portuguese. No dickness, no wise-ass comments, no derailing from the subject just to correct me. Just politeness and some healthy humility ("oh, our language is not the center of the universe").But I do admit that it would be worse if no one would ever correct me or tell me that 'you're doing it wrong'. I just find it extremely insensitive to make fun of people just because they speak or write imperfect English.If you got two choices to make: Either telling a person that he or she is committing to a repeated grammatical error or cracking a witty remark to score points, which one is your choice?</blockquote>

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