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Comment by edpichler | Hacker News Reader

"Even if nobody reads your essay, writing it will make an impact on you."

After reading a post in HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5614689) entitled "why you should write every day", I've being doing it daily in a private blog. I do it in English to improve my second language. My main language is Portuguese.

I'm doing it since 09/22/2014. I try to write about my own ideas, because I believe is the right thing to do and it is the best subject to improve myself. It's not an easy task, and I do not feel I'm improving yet, but something in me tell me that I should keep doing it.

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Tangential - Just want to give you some feedback on your comment, since you are wanting to improve your second language:

First: you've overcome a big hurdle in learning a second language, I understood what you are trying to communicate, and I did so on my first reading of it. To me, this means you're already good at english! (By comparison if I tried in my second language, which is German, I would need a few drafts and a proof-reader).

Second: You're doing commas better than a lot of native english speakers. That's pretty impressive.

Third: There are a couple of grammatical/phrasing errors I'll tell you about in your comment. These are really common errors amongst people who learn English as a second (or Nth) language, and I'm not doing it to belittle you, but to help your stated goal of improvement.

I'm doing it since 09/22/2014

This is one of those wierd places in English where the verbs "to do" or "to be" combine strangely with tenses and idioms. I'm not so sure of the technical way of stating the problem, but here's a couple of examples of a more natural way to state it:

* I've been doing it since 09/22/2014.

* I've done it since 09/22/2014.

but something in me tell me that

This is a small one, and maybe a typo, but it is part of a pattern I've seen a lot. Again, not great at the technical grammar terms, but it should be:

* but something in me tells me that

(notice the 's' on tells).

Anyway I'm always impressed with people who can learn a second language well, and wanted to encourage it and help if can.

Oh, I really appreciate your corrections, thank you! I understand that reading bad English is really annoying for natives. I try to be careful here on HN, but sometimes I do some mistakes.

You're welcome. Personally, I don't understand when people get annoyed by those things. I figure if someone has done me the favor of learning my language to communicate with me, and they've done so well enough that I understand them, why should I nitpick little errors?

I only point out things like this to people who state they are actively trying to improve - because they've done me a favor by being able to communicate with me, and I can return it by helping them at their goal.

That's a good outlook. I can't tell you how much it irks me when someone is annoyed that someone else doesn't speak English well. I always say "at least their English is better than your <other language>".

Invariably, that outlook is expressed by people who happen to only speak one language.

I don't mind when I meet someone in normal daily activities that speaks English poorly. My thoughts on the subject mirror your own.

What _IS_ frustrating is dealing with a customer service representative in an overseas call center that speaks English poorly. How many man hours have been lost in forced communication with foreign contractors in an effort to save a few dollars an hour over an American counterpart? Also, those cost savings to a company like Comcast also damage our economy by not employing Americans in need of work. It's a double-whammy of frustration.

Your English is not "bad". There are some technical grammar issues you'll continue to work out, but the meaning in your writing is perfectly clear. That makes it pretty easy to overlook anything that's not quite correct in your writing.

Thanks!

Since you seem to appreciate corrections, it's a bit more natural to say "but sometimes I make some mistakes"

I know you said you write on a personal / private blog of your own to improve but if you ever wanted another person to look things over and help you work through some of the trickier parts of learning the language I'd love to help out!

It would be nice, but I haven't cogitated to do this before. I write too much personal things, maybe it is boring for other people, moreover I do not know if this is a good idea, once I will be too much exposed. First I would need to check what I wrote.

Cogitated is a really obscure word in (modern) English.

Try "considered" or "thought about".

Oh, this is the problem when you do not have the vocabulary and use Google Translate to help.

"Cogitated" is very similar with the Portuguese translation "Cogitado", broadly used. And on Google Translate it appears as the first option.

I think that literature and travel are the keys to improve on this.

Well, I don't know what I have to offer to you in terms of a promise that I won't judge you or pry too deeply into your private life but I really have no good reason to do so. I will gladly share with you all that you want to know about me before we get started if you would like. I really just love helping people out, especially with technology. I started out working towards a career in education (with 12 years of experience) but changed over to programming and web development which is my current career. At some point I want to loop back around and teach some sort of technology discipline to come full circle with my original intentions.

There's a StackExchange site for English if you are unsure about the right way to say something: http://english.stackexchange.com/

There's also one specifically for those learning English: http://ell.stackexchange.com/

I think non-native English speakers think we are more annoyed by it than we actually are.

Any native English speaker who goes online has to be used to English being used very poorly by now, and it is much less annoying when the person making mistakes is a non-native speaker trying to learn rather than a native speaker who is lazy or functionally illiterate.

Everything you've written is completely understandable and most of it is arguably grammatically okay though sometimes phrased in ways that sound unnatural in colloquial English. For example "sometimes I do some mistakes" would be better said "sometimes I make mistakes", though the way you phrased it is perfectly understandable.

For sure! But I can't think like that, because if I do I will be too much comfortable and stop trying to improve it.

I also sell some simple software overseas and, for doing business, if you have a bad grammar or a poor vocabulary, you loose points in the price negotiation. The other part can feel like they are negotiating with a hick.

Furthermore, everything you write on web will be technically forever, you need to delight the readers and poor English can annoy them, as I've already commented.

loose => lose.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/loose http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lose

This is a common error for the natives as well so don't feel bad about it.

[Edit: I a word]

It often seems like most use on Hacker News gets this wrong (so it isn't surprising people pick up bad habits when learning English) and I regularly have to resist my inner pedant.

If the screw is too loose it could fall off and you might lose it.

For a counter-point, I'm slightly proud of how our (English) language is able to flexibly accommodate a vast array of other-language grammars, while still maintaining understanding and clarity.

The two points that the previous poster highlighted: while perhaps the native-fluent speaker will notice that the phrases have a non-standard form, both sentences are completely intelligible.

Living abroad from the United States has only served to stretch my conception of "proper English" even further.

"both sentences are completely intelligible"

This really makes me happy. I never left the country, and my first international travel will be to Melbourne in February/2015 where I will can test myself.

Native English speakers who get annoyed by mistakes made by non-native speakers deserve to be.

Another portuguese speaker here.

I think the reason why he used commas well (And that many other portuguese speakers use commas better than native english speakers) is that in portuguese you NEED to.

If you don't use commas properly in portuguese, you text can easily get excessively ambiguous, because of that schools here stress the comma a lot, I for example had in my fourth grade entire weeks dedicated to commas, and forgetting commas, even in non-langauge tests (example, in math tests) frequently resulted in some punishment (in math tests forgetting commas resulted into a loss of 0.1 points in the grade for each comma, out of the maximum of 10, thus if your math was correct enough to score 5, but you forgot 5 commas, you would instead score 4.5)

I'll briefly exercise my pedant muscles to provide some technical terms for general interest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Prog...

The first bullet is an example of past perfect progressive, which combines the past tense with the perfect and progressive aspects -- in other words, it describes that specific part of an ongoing action (progressive aspect) which has already been (past tense) completed (perfect aspect).

The second bullet exemplifies the past perfect, describing an action which has already been completed, without the additional progressive aspect to signify that the action is ongoing.

Both are correct, and would likely be understood to mean the same in colloquial usage; the only difference is that the former is somewhat more specific than the latter, in stating that the action is ongoing rather than leaving that to be inferred.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_verbs#Third_person_sing...

This is a slightly unusual case in English, in that otherwise regular verbs almost always take a trailing (e)s in their third-person singular present-tense form. For example, conjugating to tell in the present tense:

1st person: I tell; we tell 2nd person: you tell; you tell 3rd person: he tells; they tell

Presumably this exception exists for historical reasons; why we keep it around, save habit, I have no idea. In any case, we do it with more or less all English verbs, save a few:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_irregular_verbs#Verbs_w...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_modal_verbs

    > > I'm doing it since 09/22/2014
    >
    > This is one of those wierd places in English where
    > the verbs "to do" or "to be" combine strangely with
    > tenses and idioms. I'm not so sure of the technical
    > way of stating the problem,

If I'm not mistaken, the technical issue is that "I'm doing" is in the Present Progressive tense/aspect (an ongoing event in the present), which doesn't match having the past date there. "I've been doing" is in the Present Perfect Progressive tense/aspect (an event beginning in the past, but continuing into the ongoing present).

I think starting with a private blog is great advice, since it removes all apprehensions except for the "too little time" argument.

On the other hand, having other people read what you have written can be quite a thrill (especially if it becomes popular). Submitting your blog posts to HN and reddit/r/programming also can get you good feedback and alternative views (and, for that matter, mean comments too).

Have you seen http://750words.com/? It's an awesome tool that does exactly that and gives you some insights and game mechanics to make the exercise more interesting

Oh, very cool. Thanks, I just bookmarked it here.

http://xkcd.com/1179/ please :)

> I'm doing it since 09/22/2014.

"I've /been/ doing it since ..." Concordo. Acho que deve continuar escrever. De onde você é?

I agree. You should continue to write. Where are you from?

Brazil.

As someone trying to learn Portuguese, I should probably start writing in Portuguese.

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