On 6/17/2014 12:16 PM, Caligo via Digitalmars-d wrote:
My rant wasn't about his lack of fluency in the English language. You only learn once what a sentence is, and the concept translates over to most other natural languages. The same is true with the concept of constructing a paragraph. Even if he's not a native English speaker, I'm willing to bet that his writings in his mother tongue are just as bad. Just ask professors how often they encounter poor quality writings that were produced by native speakers. And FWIW, I'm not a native English speaker either. I'm multilingual, and I don't use that fact as an excuse for anything.
I completely disagree with all this. I've been teaching English (and also Debate) in Korea for 20 years at all levels of ability, from beginner to advanced. I've taught preschoolers, primary school students, university students, housewives, laborers, office workers, teachers, business executives and more. I also frequently edit documents that have already been translated from Korean to English, cleaning them up to make them more readable to native speakers. I can tell you without hesitation that there are a great many people who write very well in Korean and have a good spoken command of English, but who manage to construct some unintelligible English sentences when they write. The ability to write well in a native language and/or to speak well in a foreign language does not translate to an equivalent ability in a foreign language (particularly when there is an extreme difference in grammar between the two).
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