Someone Mocked A Russian Woman For Her Accent In English And She Delivered A Brutal Comeback

"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas".----- [I shot an Elephant] [in my pajamas] ----- or [I shot] [an elephant in my pajamas]

ufffff, guagh, perfect grammar but the sentences is awful......... i tried to translate it to my native language (spanish) and almost die in the attemp :(

"How it (the elephant) got into my pajamas, I'll never know." Groucho

Aunt Messy

Aunt Messy

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Eats, shoots, and leaves....

Compared to a lot of other languages, English looks/feels a lot more like guesswork when trying to figure out pronounciations and such. For example in Japanese, if two words/sounds use the same character(s) and yet are pronounced differently, there's usually a visual distinction that clarifies which pronounciation (and meaning) is being used. In English, 'run' literally has 40 different meanings, and you have to use contextual clues to figure out which meaning is intended.

I've always wandered about the phrase "s**t- eating grin"- like how did anyone come up with that, why is it a positive and not a negative and who on earth would grin while... you know.

Can't respond to your comment so will respond here...you are right, that's exactly what it's called and it's cool to see someone from another country know that ^_^ Technically there're rules for this stuff, like all nouns generally being divided in 3 groups each following its own rules for forming those(minus exceptions) but for native speakers it's just natural while for foreigners must be crazy hard. I guess one of Russian biggest challenges - and biggest fascinations - is how words can change depending on context, time, gender etc. In English, a table is always a table. Well perhaps it's *the* table. In Russian, depending on the suffix, it can be a big table, small table, nice table, etc. Coming from the same word for "table"(стол) but with another suffix/prefix/ending will be words "cafeteria"(столовая), "tabletop"(столешница), "a feast"(застолье)...you can make your own words that way, play with them,give them a feeling. English has its own neat little quirks but it cannot do that

Yeah, I actually know some russian, I think what you are talking about was called "Падеж", I remember the teacher actually giving me a whole table of them. I also remember that movement and asking where something is, was pretty complicated in russian with "где"/"куда" and the many forms of "ехать"/"ездить".

I think there're those in every language, although there certainly are quite a few in English. I've heard an interesting theory about that - according to it, in ancient languages it was *normal* to have one word for 2 opposite meanings. The chosen one would either be defined by some extra symbol/underline etc or be guessed from context(they did much the same for vowels which they had none/very few of in written form).

I actually don't know russian as well as english, but I will give it a try. It's not exactly articles as much as a grammatical case (падеж- padej) and russian has six of those- add plural forms and you end up with more than 8 different versions of the same word. Just click on declension in the russian section and you'll see what I mean. It's easier to give you an example in my first language- bulgarian- For example: "В стаяТА има маса/ V staiTA ima masa" ("There is A table in THE room") and "На масата има чиния/ Na masaTA ima chinia" (There is A plate on THE table). So it's kind of weird when you start learning english and have to separate the article and write it before the word. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BB

Ehehehe That's okay, Caroline. Whenever you're ready. Just, please, don't give up if you reach a certain age. Having majored in linguistics, and having some related experiences, I wholeheartedly confirm that it's never too late to acquire a new language. So, I send my best wishes to you. ♥

I almost have a mental switch in my brain for when chancing between Swedish (native) and English. If I read something in English and want to tell my boyfriend about it, it automatically comes out in English. If someone on the street asks me for directions in English it takes 2-3 seconds before I have switched and can even take in what they asked about. More often then not they'll have to repeat the question. I have so many facts in my head that I can only talk about in English because that's how I learnt it. But you can't ask me for any kitchen item in English because I have no idea what you mean. And since I almost never actually speak English, my speech is way behind my reading and writing.