I try to sing....help!

[ronws]

I had a classmate, Ray, in high school who's parents came from China. And he couldn't speak a bit of chinese. In fact, he was in my German class. So, there you have it. First american-born child in a chinese immigrant family speaking English with a southern accent and learning German. That's America. :cool:

[Foreinger]

Well, that's all very interesting. I'd assess my knowledge of english on a satisfactory mark that is not good and not very bad. Actually I'm able to understand both variants of spoken english:american and british. Though the british variant is more understandable for me. And I also easily differentiate standart british from standart american. I make grammar mistakes but I hope it doesn't prevent from understanding of the said meaning. The problem is when a person uses slang in his spoken speech. I don't always understand the meaning espesially for the first time I hear. Sometimes when I listen to the songs of some american singers I can't make anything out just some words. A good example of this is Toni Braxton. But when I heard her interview I was surprized how clear was her speech and every spoken word was recognized by my ears. I love english for its melodic intonation. It's smth like the english don't speak.....they sing. A very beautiful language for me, perhaps it's the most beautiful in the world.

I read a little information here about ukrain. It's close to russian. I've never learned it but somehow understand when they speak it though I can't speak it at all.

I also learned the german language. I hated it but I had to learn it together with english. It irritated me to tears. And I still can't make anything out in it if the speech is fluent. Many words are unknown to me. And the most problematic thing about german for me was its terrible grammar. I tried to understand it but couldn't. The thing is the german grammar has almost nothing common with the russian grammar. The english grammar has much more common with the russian grammar, strange but it's true!. The german word order is still smth allian to me. The teacher was constantly finding numerous mistakes. So I often got unsatisfactory grades. English word order interfered all the time and I could do nothing about that. I simply couldn't understand what was wrong with the word order. The teacher told I applied the english word order into the german language. I used only one article for all words and couldn't understand how it is so that inanimate objects have male and female sexes:o. What was even worse is that when on the lessons of oral speech I had to tell smth in german the teacher's ears were "bleeding" of what he heard. I replaced some german words with english and didn't even notice and of course the accent left much to be desired. That was funny for all of them. I hated german and always had fun making stupid mistakes and I never felt awkward. Thank God I'll never deal with this ugly language anymore.....

I never feel awkward when I make stupid mistakes in english cause clever people understand that english is not my native language and never laugh at me.....;)