Reference Second Language Players ~ Rising a topic

I'll throw in my 2 cents as it's only been German ESL's replying


So, I thought it is time to talk. How do you deal with the language issue, my dear non-english colleagues? How hard is it for you to follow games? How hard to write updates? Do you feel limited by the language? Forced to compromise your writing?


I have one answer which I'd say is Pre-SoTS. Back in the day when I played iBoP and what not. I was young, it was a few years ago now and back then I really tried to do my best but in the end I just felt that my language and writing skills did not even come close to what some others were posting.
Truly, I was jealous and felt as if what I wanted to project in my posts never quite came close once I posted what I had written.
I realize now that perhaps it was more my general writing skills that lacked and not so much my language skills (I'm not saying that I wrote, or still, write perfect grammar and spelling but the general purpose of the post came through.. I think ). So in the end I abandoned the JC and the RPF boards as I felt that the competition was to hard and my skills weren't nearly enough to compete. How could I interact with elaborated in depth character posts without totally ruining the moment?


And then there is Post-SoTS, a few years later, a few mmo's under my belt and a few more English written books read. I imagine that I slightly comperhend the way to build English sentences better now than before. But I'm still so uncertain, I use the FF Built in spelling software but it isn't always that I'm actually sure if the software spelled the word I wanted to use correctly or if it's a completely different word!

I can recognize myself in that aspect of always trying to write proper English without any mistakes. And I often delete half of what I have written just because I'm not all to sure if what I've written will be perceived the way I want it to. Take that post where my character Beckfris and The Vulture. Man, I wanted it to be so much more elaborated, so much more feeling to it. But I dunno, I think I made at least a decent impression but not even close to what I could have written in Swedish.

So yeah, I feel forced to compromise my writing. It's easy enough to talk English, but to actually write it and get what's inside my head in Swedish to English is a pain in the rear end. Take this post for example, at this point I have already deleted one third of what I originally wrote.

The real big difference I guess is that I have come to accept, to some extent, that I'm not perfect yet and it will not improve if I don't write anything at all

 

TDO, if it helps any, I thought you were American until very recently. I didn't realise it was your second language at all.

 

haha, what? For real? That's awesome to hear!

 

I forget you´re not a natural all the time. Despite you told me . . . you surely play in another league than most of us Germans when it comes to English . . .

 

Seriously ... I remember your Deci in IBOP. I thought he was a nutter but it didn't even cross my mind that you might not be RPing in your first language, and I'm usually pretty good at spotting 'em. Sure you made some mistakes and typos, but they're the same mistakes and typos the rest of us make ... you know?

Funnily enough, I too abandoned IBOP in the end because the pressure to excel was getting to my teenage self, so it wasn't just you there.

 

haha, yeah he was a real original that one.. I wanted to much to fast out of that character, and I think that may be the reason as to why he, and I, failed so hard at achieving a good RP experience. But meh, you live and you learn.

I'm **** glad to hear that you can't tell the difference

And Fin, honestly, like you can't tell I'm Swedish I've never noticed you being specially German either. I think that this mix of ESL's and EFL's not only improves our language skills but also trains our eye to accept, understand and adapt to different forms of sentence building.

 

I actually think RPFCity is so hard to get as a FLGuy because we know many of these dialogues with different owrds and voices. Especially when it comes to childhood movies . . .

 

Well, you got a point there. Same reason why I dropped out of Disney back then. I do not know how the Disney characters sound like in English. It´s childmovies I watch with my godson. So I do it in English. Obviously.

And Draco said if LordT makes a Mass Effect shorty, it needed to be in German. See reason there. I hate the English voice. And the German of No1 was pretty fine (don´t get met started on ME2 Shepard, how could they CHANGE his voice) . . .

So, anything from the audio section is hard to get in English. I never get Sainthearts jokes about Schwarzenegger in English. Saw a few movies OmU but his German voice will awlays be HIS VOICE. And it´s actually dubbed, except him speaking fluent German. Well, coming from a German speaking country, actually . . .