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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tarchon" data-source="post: 2425411" data-attributes="member: 5990">I dunno - am I just reading more closely than everyone else? Turanil's English is pretty good, but there must be a dozen distinct usage quirks in it. Nobody else noticed "or does it look like written by an English native?"More correct: "...or does it look like it was written by a native English speaker?" Or potentially: "... or does it look like something written by a native English speaker?""More than once, some people [...] told me that I write in English fairly well" is also a pretty strong indicator - very few second-language speakers ever master English tense and aspect, but native speakers would almost use the perfect there, plus there's the partitive use of "some" - very typical of French ESL. "Some" is a source of constant confusion among most French people I know. Normally, we'd say "More than once, people have told me..."In this case, the difference in aspect ("told" vs. "have told") is due to the non-narrative nature of the statement. If I was recounting some specific event that happened to me at the grocery store last week, I might say "At the grocery store, some people told me that I speak English very well." This, on the other hand, isn't narrating an event but describing a habitual action ("more than once"), which would be "People have often told me that I speak English very well" or (since it isn't placed in the past by the adverb "once") "People often tell me that I speak English very well."</blockquote>

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