You Cannot Learn English Without Making Mistakes

Xie   Fri Sep 26, 2008 7:11 am GMT
Unless you want to do something with your identity, I think antimoon's writings are fine and changes are unnecessary. For those who write in another language natively: think about it, and you know how different other people write in your country/probably another country that speaks and writes the same language.

I think we spend more time in passive understanding (everyone else in the speech community, including L2 learners, and possibly immigrants as well) than in writing and speaking (which we do ourselves). Needless to say, when I'm a guy, I don't have to (or even shouldn't) write like someone who isn't.

Again, here, I support the antimoon theory of "input only": http://www.antimoon.com/how/input-boydell.htm

You might think I'm switching concepts interchangeably: even if I do something like shadowing, I think I'm essentially trying to produce output based on input (sort of like parroting, but certainly not tactless). When I listen to VOA news reports and read the texts, even tho I do find VOA somewhat "objective" (or seemingly), despite being a clear source of info. supported by its own country, some mechanisms of mine help me to associate its information with my knowledge of it just by thinking. Information can't think (and can be distorted in a zillion of ways), but people can.

When I read news by both VOA (in English) and Deutsche Welle (in Chinese, often about China-EU/German relations), I'll immediately compare what they tell with what I can read in Chinese newspapers elsewhere.

That's also why, for the reasons above, reading and thus learning in context is so natural and not to worry too much about. Having said that, I also treat, in this context, language learning thru reading as part of learning how to read. There are many facets (this is clichéd) of a single language in usage, and those are pretty much the exact areas for practice I'm always looking for.
Alice   Mon Sep 29, 2008 12:04 am GMT
I agree
Pathfinder   Tue Sep 30, 2008 4:13 am GMT
Most native speakers of English make mistakes all the time. 'Native level' doesn't mean perfect in any sense, it just means that the person is able to communicate fluently to a point at which the person uses colloquialisms, old sayings, etc. with ease, and can understand other things like insinuations, intonation, and so on... things like that. You can still be achieve native speaker level and still make mistakes.
Pathfinder   Tue Sep 30, 2008 4:14 am GMT
Like I just did up there 'cause I wasn't paying attention :)