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0 pointsmoritz2y ago0 comments

I’m not American and don’t live in America (I presume by “America” you mean the United States?), but shouldn’t it be “… refuse to improve their English”?

0 comments

ericmay2y ago

It should be “refuse to…” yea. I’m going to hazard a guess that the author you’re responding to missed the to there in their comment. It’s a common thing. Sometimes for example when I’m replying on mobile I might miss a word or autocorrect from my web browser may do something strange and I don’t catch it.

> I presume by “America” you mean the United States?

Yea that’s almost for sure what they mean. Typically people from the United States of America are called Americans and people across the world refer to those people as “Americans” and they/we also refer to ourselves and our country as “America” as a shortened form. I’m a little surprised you weren’t aware of this given your clearly written English but yep that’s what that means!

ofjcihen2y ago

Presumably the parent comment meant that their English was poor to the point where they couldn’t communicate effectively with the worker, not that the worker was getting their point across but lacking pristine grammar.

As an anecdote I’ve found that non-Americans from well off families tend to speak near grammatically perfect English because that’s how foreign languages are taught.

moritzOP2y ago

As an anecdote, an eternal rule for venting about insufficient language skills of damned foreigners on the Internet seems to be that it must be articulated by at least one demonstration of one's own inability to possess the very competence demanded (e.g., through absolutely careless spelling, grammatical error, etc.), which my contribution above was simply commenting on ironically— with a tangential spoof of U.S. exceptionalism of course.

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