From: Joseph M. Newcomer on
When we were visiting a friend in The Netherlands, we went to his home for dinner, and his
12-year-old son was absolutely wild to hear "real Americans" speaking English. What was
informative to him was that as native-born spearkers of American English, our language
usage differs wildly from what he had been taught in school. Talking about the evolution
of orthography in American English and how it differs from British English is alone a
topic he found interesting, plus discussing regionalism, various accents (think, deep
South, Maine, and our own Southwest Pennsylvania, plus I can do a fair British and Irish
accent parody). He had never heard punning in English (although he was familiar with it
as an art form; every language has puns).
joe

On Mon, 24 May 2010 02:12:12 -0700, "Mihai N." <nmihai_year_2000(a)yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>> I guess I'm not the only one who thought Russian
>> would be a neat language to learn! :-)
>
>Growing up in comunist Romania it was not my choice :-)
>I was lucky to also get some 13 years of French and 4 of English.
>Both of them practiced way more than the Russian.
>
>Add to that some years of watching Bulgarian TV, and the result is
>that I understand some Russian and Bulgarian, but I can't speak any
>because I mix things. For some words I know both the Russian and
>Bulgarian form, for some only one. Then in some cases I know
>that is the language, in other cases I don't. A complete mess :-)
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer(a)flounder.com
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm