Le dimanche 16 Juillet 2006 22:25, Moose a écrit :
> Manuel Viet wrote:
> > ......, but funnily, when I meet native english
> > speakers now, they've got a much harder time guessing where I'm from.
> > I've heard everything from Australia to Scotland along with Canada and
> > Wales, but when I say 'french' that comes as a big surprise because
> > unlike others I do take care to accentuate.
>
> "...accentuate the positive, eliminate the native, and don't mess with
> Mr. in-between."
>
> Your written English is very good, and my skills at languages other than
> English are abysmal. Yet I hope I may be helping when I point out that
> the usage of "accentuate" in your last sentence is not a way I would
> ever use it. It may be dictionary correct, but my guess is that
> virtually no native English speaker would use it that way.
You caught me both hands in the cookie jar. That's the reason why I said I
can't pretend to be bilingual, because unlike a native speaker, I tend to use
too much words of latin origin in general and as verbs specificaly ; I assume
I should have wrote "I do take care to place the emphasis where it belongs"
or something to the same effect. That's a really bad habit, but I can't help
since my brain was wired sooner on a french vocabulary built on latin roots.
The germanics counterparts making roughly half of your dictionnary are very
foreign to me. I understand them when I read them, but those words come
second only when I need to express an idea (for instance, when I think about
"to assess" that's "to evaluate" that arrives first). But I'm proud I can
understand english without having to make a translation, just like I
understand french. It's like a switch in my mind : if I listen or read
something in english, I can't grab the meaning of anything in french around,
and vice-versa. But this required a lot of practice, and to keep up I read
probably as much novels in english as in french, I listen to the beeb when I
have the opportunity, and I watch TV serials without subtitles from the DVDs.
In fact, I really appreciate the anglo-saxon culture, as much as mine, and I
wish I were more litterate but I had to choose and I wasn't forseeing myself
as a teacher of english litterature or a professional translator, so I went
to the law school instead.
But thank you for saying my writing skills are good, I only wish it was true.
I know I still make a lot of mistakes.
--
Manuel Viet
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