Quote:
Originally Posted by Richey79
I taught ESL classes for several years, so am familiar with most of the mistakes made by someone who is in the process of learning English. Her errors strike me as being merely clumsy usage; they're far more similar to Dan Brown's errors, lazy uses of syntax and gross ambiguities.
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I don't think she's learning English; I think she grew up speaking a dialect strongly influenced by Greek. I suspect she's more fluent in Greek than English, and her family, maybe local community, is multilingual with sloppy English. Her phrasing is similar to some of my co-workers' emails--the nouns and verbs are all correct, but the prepositions seem to be chosen almost at random, the modifiers are in strange spots, and the verb tenses get a little odd, especially for anything abstract. And, of course, she hasn't bothered to pay attention to formal grammar or punctuation rules since she left school.