Many of the people I do have online conversations with speak English as their first language.
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@tante @grrrr_shark and the better you are in the foreign language, the worse it gets because people don't have that subconscious "oh this is their 2nd language. I better speak simply" trigger.
Paul Taylor has a great bit about this (Warning: strong language in both English and French. You can turn on translated CC if you don't speak French)
@varx @tante THIS. People presume I understand very well all the time, and that the way I speak is the way I intend to speak. What they don't get is that in my second languages, I'm often working at the absolute edge of my capability and can't maintain it for all that long.
I have days where I do very well and days where I can barely talk. People underestimate the mental overhead and... gah, L2s are such a complicated topic.
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@axoln it wasn't Cory. Just random comments
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@tante @grrrr_shark and the better you are in the foreign language, the worse it gets because people don't have that subconscious "oh this is their 2nd language. I better speak simply" trigger.
Paul Taylor has a great bit about this (Warning: strong language in both English and French. You can turn on translated CC if you don't speak French)
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(Sparked by some of the comments to my recent article about Cory Doctorow telling me how my writing sucks and is unreadable because of grammar mistakes and typos.)
@tante Not a native speaker myself, but I've dealt with English writing (by native and non-native speakers alike) in different capacities for many years, and yours is both concise _and_ conversational (great! it's a blog, not a thesis). Criticizing you for the occasional typo strikes me as somewhat mean-spirited.
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(Sparked by some of the comments to my recent article about Cory Doctorow telling me how my writing sucks and is unreadable because of grammar mistakes and typos.)
@tante Who tf cares about ad-hominem attacks either way? I guess most native-speaker MAGA voters in the US have way worse grammar and spelling skills, written amd spoken, so he may kiss your ass with his hypocrisy.
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Like in German I am actually somewhat eloquent and texts I write don't look like a person with a head injury wrote them.
@tante as someone trying to learn German, and aware that my grasp is barely functional, please don't lose heart. English is 3 languages in a trenchcoat, and has stolen more from other cultures than the British Museum. Even native speakers get beaten by others for not communicating properly. Gatekeeping is ugly in any language
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(Sparked by some of the comments to my recent article about Cory Doctorow telling me how my writing sucks and is unreadable because of grammar mistakes and typos.)
@tante Honestly I'd take people quibbling over how you said something as a compliment, because it means they couldn't find any problem with *what* you were saying.
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(Sparked by some of the comments to my recent article about Cory Doctorow telling me how my writing sucks and is unreadable because of grammar mistakes and typos.)
@tante ja, of course they did. That's really cheap shots (is that the correct idiom? there you have it!) along the lines of "see how it'd be better if you just started using LLMs". It's really like kindergarden here sometimes. Don't worry about your English - if I may say so as another non-native speaker with his own idiosyncrasies. Heck, even my German is idiosyncratic.
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Many of the people I do have online conversations with speak English as their first language. I kinda get by but you native speakers really underestimate how hard it is to express oneself in a foreign language. Concepts work differently, metaphors don't really translate, references you have used for decades don't make sense.
@tante as someone whose third language is German (English second) I can kinda relate to this, especially the concepts part, which seems to only get messier as I spend more time working in German. I still have things that are exclusive to each language (though my Dutch is now so bad that I think people assume I'm a German immigrant when I visit my parents).
Science is an English thing. Politics are a German thing. Cooking is a mix of all of them (none of them particularly coherent). -
@tante This reminds me of that "semantic ablation" article from last week: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/semantic_ablation_ai_writing/
I prefer real character of actual writing, and there's an extra... energy? tension? in English written by nonnative speakers. It gives a glimpse into alternative ways of slicing concepts that enriches rather than depletes the writing.
Screw the naysayers.
Oh, thank you for this. A lot of long words, but I think I got the gist of it.
Non-native English writer/reader here. I have an easier time conversing with other non-natives than natives. As if we are all very careful that we understand each other, spending extra energy to be precise and check that we are on the same page.
As for Tante's writing, Danish and German are structurally close enough that I do not notice the 'Germanification' - the subtle cues left behind.
