[matheusmoreira]

I too try my best to learn and use colloquialisms. Excessively formal language is very academic, something you learn in a school rather than by actually communicating with other humans. Inability to understand and communicate using informal language and slang marks us as foreigners. Even subtle differences in word choice can sound weird to native speakers.

I test my fluency by attempting to pass off as a native speaker on the internet. If anyone ever suspected I'm not a native speaker, they never told me. I was once unmasked in an old video game though because of a mistake specific to that game and people from my country, a mistake I had internalized since childhood. That was quite shocking to me...

[bojan]

> I test my fluency by attempting to pass off as a native speaker on the internet. If anyone ever suspected I'm not a native speaker, they never told me.

How does this work exactly? Do you explicitly say you're a native speaker and then wait until someone realizes you are not and tell you?

Because I don't see it happening that people will tell you they don't think you're a native speaker organically, in a conversation that's going on about something else.

[matheusmoreira]

On anonymous and pseudonymous communities, people tend to assume everyone's american for various reasons. This is also true here on HN.

In my experience, when people think someone else is a foreigner, they ask them where they're from. The assumption that they were talking to an american was violated so they try to determine who they're actually talking to. So if I can manage to not violate that assumption, it must mean that my speech resembles that of an american native speaker.

[kingbirdy]

> I was once unmasked in an old video game though because of a mistake specific to that game and people from my country, a mistake I had internalized since childhood. That was quite shocking to me...

I'm curious to know what the "mistake" was here. Is it something like referring to in-game items via their name in your native language, instead of English?

[matheusmoreira]

Yeah, sort of. The game is Tibia, it has an item called copper shield. When I was a kid, all my friends and I used to write and pronounce it as cooper shield. I internalized that mistake to the point I actually thought the item was called cooper shield despite knowing what copper is.

So decades later I went a gaming community on the internet and suggested we all play this old game. Everything was fine until I said cooper shield. One guy immediately messaged me "br?" and I was shocked. No one else noticed it. Turns out he was also a foreigner who learned portuguese by playing the game together with brazilians and he recognized that specific brazilian mistake.

[yodsanklai]

> a mistake I had internalized since childhood

This can happen even in our native language.