This is my second entry today in Problogger, my first one was in turning-your-weakness-into-strength-and-threats-into-opportunites blog.
I have turned the title into just want it said. This has been done with great suppot from the centre manager and department managers, for a company that approximatly 4000 staff.
With only a grade 9 ed. I applied for a cashier/supervisor position and was awarded the position. In the 3 years that I have been with the company, advancement has been there for me. Now I do help in hiring,data entry,teaching different program that are required by the company.
This one opened my eyes alot more. So I know it can be done.
This has taught me more how to handle many types of difficult people.

Mike

Watch TV / radio news, learn the intonation/ common expression
Do either one, if you can’t do both.

the beginning will be tough.

things will smooth out, as practice makes perfect.

:)

hope it helps

Roy

(I am a non-english speaking person, who learnt english not so long ago.)

I searched on the net the other day (the term: “earn money online”) which returned to this website. The content pulled me in and I have kept reading for a couple of days.

I wonder what makes this problogger.net is THE result of the above search. The original content and the raves seem to be the reasons.

Thanks for the posts, Darren.

Roy
Btw… I am also a non-native speaker who is learning how to write everyday.
Tough to learn a language indeed. However, I think we can do it, if we are willing to learn it, day by day.

I’m more likely to “connect” with the blogger that makes the honest mistakes, is more consumed by communication and sharing their own opinion than I am the one who is consumed by perfection.

Kind of like walking into a home that makes you feel welcomed and comfortable rather than feeling afraid to touch anything.

Guess I’ll always be a country gal at heart.

Thanks for sharing this topic Darren. Hope you’re enjoying your holiday!

You mean “effectively” ;-)

LOL.

It’s not the “improper” use of language that bugs me — I’m certainly a fan of mangling the rules myself. It’s that the writing fails to communicate the writer’s thoughts, and I’m left to respond to them.

What I really wish is that writers would spend a little more time *re*-reading what they’ve written before they post or send it, and that they would do so with an attempt to put themselves in their readers’ shoes.

(All that said, I haven’t had my coffee yet this morning, so I apologize if all that was unintelligible!)

I understand how it can be very impressive at first, especially with the amount of people outside here who’ll jump at once at any tiny grammar mistake (I don’t think it happens that much in blogs in general, but when a post is controversial, or on forums, for instance, I’ve often seen people dismiss a whole argument with a “start learning to write properly before daring to present opinions”, which, is, let’s be honest, completely lame). This said, if we don’t do it, we’ll never manage it, right? We can’t improve if not fighting our fears of not writing well and running away from the actual process. The same goes for writing in general, which is a matter dear to my heart: sure, my first novel is crap, but if I refuse to practice because it’s not perfect and doesn’t deserve to be ‘dirtied’ with incorrect language, I’ll never write anything.

At the same time, I think it’s in fact often easy to tell whether a person is a native speaker or not: the kind of mistakes they make give them away, so to say, and are very different from net/l33t speak or any other kind of “I don’t care about writing well” attitude. Among other things, there are circumstances in which I can tell that a blogger has a French-speaking background, because of a sentence that is a direct translation of one of our local expressions, etc. Also, announcing from the start that English isn’t our mother tongue can avoid many problems later on; people will tend to be less picky, and more helpful when it comes to correct the mistakes.

It helped me learn, and by openly acknowledging my weakness, it removed all fears within me.

And now that people knew English is only my second language, they were really sympathetic and encouraging. People commented on my posts with encouraging words, tips about the “lesson of the day” and how to improve my English and sound like a native speaker, etc. One guy even blogged about me. That really really encouraged me (I’m a newbie as far as blogging is concerned, so it was a BIG deal for me that someone actually blogged about li’l ol’ ME).

Slowly I lost interest though, as other projects came up. Pity. But others can do the same thing. I know it really helped me.

I think I will start the blog again. It was not only nice, it really helped my English. And it may help others too, as people learn with me. And we can all help each other learn.

Nice post Darren, and thanks for bringing this up. Just thought I’d share my own experience here.

Writing in my 2nd language in kind of challenging in the beginning. But I’d learnt a lot. The most important thing is about getting the point across. You can achieve this through writing and graphical illustrations; and I appended both of these things together when I’m writing.

I blogged about this but it seems it didn’t ping this entry at Problogger.