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Comment by Rooster61 | Hacker News Reader

This is a wonderful project. Well done. You might just inspire this software engineer to take his first crack at hardware. :)

One somewhat personal question, if you don't mind. You say you are Portuguese. Is English a second language for you? I don't see the telltale signs of a Portuguese -> English speaker (I have a lot of experience interacting with Portuguese speakers, and their English mistakes are pretty uniform due to the specific differences between the languages, esp regarding prepositions and tense). Your article, as many have noted, is beautifully written even for a native English speaker.

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Thank you, if it's something you like, you should try a hardware project, for sure :)

And yes I am Portuguese, born and raised and I do know what you mean, there are mistakes that are somewhat common for Portuguese speaking English and I do make an effort not to make the same mistakes. However I know my English is far form perfect and it's always easier when it's in written form. I think that the fact that I've always spent too much time watching american/british movies and TV shows made me pay more attention to how English should be spoken :).

But anyway, thank you for saying I speak perfect English, it's actually a great compliment. :)

It's almost like Portuguese people are not a uniform block, right?

Who said anything about Portuguese people as a uniform block? That doesn't even make any sense as it's not only Portuguese people that speak Portuguese lol. I only referenced those who have either chosen or were involuntarily exposed to English as a second language who speak Portuguese natively.

> and their English mistakes are pretty uniform due to the specific differences between the languages, esp regarding prepositions and tense

This is not the case. Different people make different mistakes, as any exposure to a high-school level English class will allow you to discover. There's a case for clusters of similar errors, but then again any generalizing statement is true for a sufficiently high level of clustering.

"Their" referring to the group of Portuguese speakers that I know, not Portuguese people as a block. That implication came about due to you alone. The observation that you quoted is based on both my interaction with them, but also their interpretation and observation of themselves relayed to me in conversation(many of them are in the field of linguistics, so this type of thing comes up a good bit).

I can see how you could draw that conclusion from my post, however. I assure you there was no intent to generalize.

> I assure you there was no intent to generalize.

My apologies for misunderstanding, then. And thanks for making that clear.

That's a very strange view. Of course people with a native language will make similar mistakes when learning a new language. Swedish speakers have issues pronouncing "jump" ("yump" ) and cheap ("sheep") because the language doesn't really have those sounds. Because were and was is the same word in Swedish, that's also a common mistake.

I can see how that remark could have felt bad, but there are plenty of opportunities not to take it that way. This is why we have a site guideline that asks all of us to "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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