i think you took my post personally. have i made any spelling or grammar mistakes in my post? i don’t understand. I did not correct the mistakes in your post through common courtesy.
Capital letters are generally accepted as standard for people writing English - and one would hope that someone who teaches English for a living would be able to use them currectly. Not using them is certainly deviation from the typographical norm, which could be interpreted as an error; using them inconsistently even more so. (I personally find the habit of omission twee and pretentious, but I suppose that’s a matter of taste.)
Using sentence case would certainly improve your writing and help everyone understand your posts better.
I didn’t see much wrong with bardos’s spelling or grammar… 
Lack of capitals was the only non-standard English in Bardos’ post, and it really is quite common to do that online - it doesn’t affect comprehension at all.
I have no idea what happened to the English in your last post, though. It’s as if you’re an English language learner yourself, but you’re not and usually you’re articulate. Were you parodying something?
On the similarities between Dutch and English the vernacular form of “the water is cold” in the South Yorkshire dialect of English is indistinguishable from Dutch:
t’ watter’s co’d: S Yorks
't waters coud: Dutch
What they said, bardos. If myself or any of my classmates had written a sentence without any capitalization in an exam we would have gotten a zero as big and round as a millstone.
But it’s not an exam. It’s also not a grammar or spelling ‘error.’ Besides, you wouldn’t get a zero just for not using correct capitalisation - you’d just lose a few marks. At least, that’s how it’d work with any of the major English language exams.
It’s also not nearly as bad as writing ‘currectly’ when correcting someone. 
Jjimm, seriously, what’s up with that?
nava et al, you are all correct vis-a-vis the use of capital letters in formal english. the last time i checked, this forum is not an exam, but an exchange of ideas.
as in many other internet forums, when folks get low on ideas, they attack grammar and spelling.
If that was the consensus in that thread you should really link to it so I can tell everyone they’re wrong. There’s tons of countries in Europe (or elsewhere) with smaller populations than that of the Netherlands (16 million), where the English is far, far worse - in fact, you indicate that the Belgians (~10 million) speak worse English. I don’t agree with that assessment, or with the argument that it has to do with Belgian bilingualism, but I am fairly certain this *is * true for people in the Czech Republic, Portugal or Greece. Don’t they need books, music and movies?
The truth is that it has everything to do (as was indicated above) with 1) the education systems, both in terms of the value placed on foreign language education and in the level and quality of education that the system is actually able to offer; 2) what they show on television and whether they dub it or not; 3) whether the languages are similar to English to begin with, making it easier for people to learn the language. The Scandinavians and the Dutch grow up in excellent conditions on all three counts, and have been doing so for decades now, hence their proficiency. In other countries, this is changing rapidly, e.g. in the former communist countries, where learning English has become much more important obviously, but also in countries like France and Spain, which are less isolated and where young people (IME, no cite) are more eager to learn and speak English than older generations. This takes some time to take effect, of course, since these eager youngsters need qualified teachers which are hardly always available.
Well spotted. I wrote a reply in English, used Google Translate to change it into Italian, then from that into Hungarian, then into German, then back into English. I think the tool did a very good job, even if the grammar is a bit skewed.
Agreed.
I am reasonably fluent in German as well as being a native English speaker. Without ever having studied Dutch, I can understand written Dutch very well indeed and spoken Dutch pretty well unless the speaker is very unclear or speaking at 100 miles an hour. Dutch speakers have similar advantages when learning English.
That’s not Dutch. I’m not sure how the Yorkshire dialect is pronounced and how similar it sounds to the Dutch, but the Dutch for ‘the water is cold’ is ‘het water is koud’, pronounced (roughly): ‘hat wah-tur is cowt’.
Phew. I wondered if you’d developed early-onset Alzheimer’s overnight or something.
It is pretty good considering the number of translations. I’ve tried the same before with Babelfish and come back with results that were a lot less comprehensible, though highly amusing.
That’s pretty impressive! I’ve not met anyone who can understand spoken Dutch (written is far easier, but still tough) on the basis of their English (or even their German) without any prior training. In another thread (here) people made a similar claim and as a challenge, I directed them to the website of a well-known Dutch newspaper (www.volkskrant.nl) to see if they could tell me what the articles were about. Turned out to be harder than they thought! IME people overestimate the accessibility of Dutch to English speakers or even to German speakers, for that matter, but if you’ve learned German you’re off to a good start.
I lived in France for 6 months when I was 11, and attended a French private school for a term and a half.
The locals - even the ones my age - were about a million times more comfortable with spoken English than I was with spoken French, and I had been studying French since I was 7 and was better at it than virtually all my peers in England.
The difference was absolutely night and day.
Interestingly, I was probably slightly ahead in reading and writing French, versus their reading and writing of English.
I suspect a lot of the difference comes down to cultural imperialism. I don’t know about now, but at the time most well-to-do French families had satellite TV, and in addition to French-language broadcasts also received most of the UK Sky TV package, which was all in English. Also, Canal Plus and the other major French over-the-air broadcasters showed subtitled English-language stuff practically as often as French stuff.
ETA: I also went on holiday to Majorca when I was about 9, and was a little surprised at how poorly the locals spoke English, considering that British tourists practically outnumber them for most of the year. Still, I was able to get by without difficulty.
Those who speak English and German would find it much easier than those who speak only one.
I’m going mainly on being able to read signs in museums and the like (a couple of museums in Amsterdam that didn’t have English signs up - can’t remember which ones exactly, but they might have been the hash museum and/or the sex museum), being able to use Dutch instructions in manuals, Dutch websites and so on. I’ll give it a go now, but TBH my German has got a lot worse since then and I doubt I’ll do as well these days.
OK: the top story is:
The daughter of the ‘death pilot’ Julio P (at first I thought that might be the name of the plane or something, till I noticed the caption under the photo) has written to Princess Maxima calling upon her to use her to influence to get her father out of jail.
So writes the Telegraf on Monday. In the letter, the daughter emphasises that both she and Maxima have fathers who worked with the government during the military regime in Argentina.
The spokesman for the National Information Service said (let on?) that the NOS (whoever they are) were ‘searching [the letter] hard.’ (Presumably searching here means investigating). When the letter is (don’t know this part - something about the letter being above water - an idiomatic phrase maybe) he’ll pass it on to the relevant minister. Want (?) ‘the princess cannot and will not get involved in this case,’ the National Information Service states.
The former Transavia pilot is in Spain at the moment, but will, according to the Telegraf, probably be quickly sent to Argentina. ‘I want justice. And that I’ll find only in the land of my birth.’
Can’t be arsed to do the rest. Course, for all you know, I could be using Google translate or something similar. If we ever meet in real life maybe I’ll give it another go.
Bloody hell. I can’t even understand the headline Oplichters Golden Sun krijgen 5 jaar cel and 3 of the words in it are gimmes.
Kids at a French private school have probably been having frequent English lessons since they were about 3 years old, if not earlier, as well as frequent trips across the channel.
I knew one bloke, a waiter, in a touristy part of Mallorca who not only spoke no English but didn’t speak regular Spanish very well either - only Catalan, and even then it was the Mallorcan version of Catalan. This was 17 years ago, but he was about 21 or so then and British tourism had been huge for years in Mallorca. A lot of the tourist staff were the same. The good thing about that was that I ended up learning a lot of Spanish (I worked in a nightclub there) even though I’ve forgotten quite a lot of it now.
I also have a step-aunt who’s British and has been married to a Spanish man for about thirty years (after a holiday romance, unlikely as that seems). They live in Benidorm, a tourist area that’s extremely popular with Brits, run a restaurant, and obviously she’s a native English speaker. Spain also has English as a foreign language as standard at school.
About 9 years ago their 18 year old son came over to visit and he could barely speak English at all. Seriously - he couldn’t manage to answer ‘how old are you?’ He didn’t seem educationally subnormal in other ways and could speak Spanish perfectly well. I really have no idea how someone with so many linguistic advantages managed to speak so little English.
This is fun. I’ve had a go with another story:
How’d I do?