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by justlearning 5535 days ago
".. always amazed by the little clues that are behind by otherwise proficient non-native speakers."

could you elaborate?

2 comments

I'll go through the article, posting some very nitpicky corrections until I get bored. These will all be arguable and my "corrected" versions are of course non-unique and probably themselves very imperfect. Personally I initially scanned the article so fast that I didn't really notice any of the phrasing oddities...

> If we want to achieve any kind of bigger success

This sounds awkward to me. Perhaps "In order to be successful" would work better?

> because I have some tricks how to fool myself into work

s/tricks how to fool myself into work/tricks for fooling myself into working/

> When it seems that I really do not feel like working

This one isn't that bad, but it's sort of strange; the kind of thing I'd imagine someone with an accent would say. I'd take out the "it seems that" and change the "do not" to "don't" (I think the "really" in combination with the "do not" is awkward).

> I even do not enjoy the food that much this way, as my mind is shattered by 5 different things.

s/I even do not enjoy/I don't even enjoy/ Also, "shattered" is an odd word to use. I guess I'd say something like "my focus is split among 5 different things" or something like that.

Anyway, I'm tired of this now. As I said, very nitpicky. Not to mention, native English speakers phrase things awkwardly all the time.

Awesome! Thanks for the "kick in the face" :) Fixed as suggested.
One thing I've found particularly for German speakers is the use of phrases like "since 2 years". A native speaker would say "since 2 years ago", fixing the reference to a definite point in time rather than a duration alone.
I'd love a service that would fix such mistakes in my blog posts to make them look more native; something like an online mum that would fix the turn of phrase I use. I'm french, and this is typically the kind of mistakes I do all the time as well.
"...mistakes I _make_ all..." would be a more 'native' wording. (That isn't a dig, by the way, just given as a piece of information.)

My wife is Italian, and it's amazing how many constructs you come across that are correct, but sound odd. Defining rules for many of them in English is almost impossible given the unstructured nature of the language, which drives her mad given her background as a Mathematician.

It also annoys her no end that most people don't correct/question her if they understand the intent of what she said. They feel they'd come across as rude pedants, but she wants to know so that she can improve her grasp of the language.

While I don't want to go too far down the road of being your online mum (:P), I'd be happy to give your blog posts a once-over. Just email me your drafts (address in profile).