#this isn't even the worst example of the flashlight being useless

[mister-julius]

The funniest part about playing E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy

hoo man it's dark in here

thank goodness for my handy dandy flashlight!

lemme just switch that on real quick...

...gee

thanks

[himmelheim]

With all due respect, this is the worst linguistic take I've seen today. Also seeing lots of "English privilege" useless guilt nonsense in the notes.

Btw, you'll always have moments of anxiety when making posts in your target language (tl) no matter what language you are learning (for example a Portuguese person learning Russian); and many people feel like that when posting in their mothee tongue simply because they have difficulties at expressing themselves.

I recommend working on that and remembering that it's better for you to make mistakes with your tl on the internet gives you the chance to learn from them in a generally friendlier and less risky environment than say, a job assignment. It's okay (and expected, and actually helpful) to make mistakes.

On the youtube comment there is also an important ignorance about the diversity of accents (we generally call them dialects in the field because many accents also carry grammatical and vocabulary differences, in other words, they are actually dialects, but I'll call them accents here) within the English language.

Appalachian accent (a.k.a Southern Mountain dialect in the linguistics world), for example, still carries pronunciation and grammar from Elizabethan times (even in really basic verbs like "to be"), and thus can be very hard or impossible to understand not just to foreign speakers but native ones too. Not to mention variety — there's at least 43 English dialects in the UK alone (If I remember correctly it changes each 200 miles, more or less) and some linguists count even 50. The Queen's English (or Standard Southern English) is taken as the standard because it's hard to study 50 dialects without something specific to compare them to.

In Spanish, I've lost count of the times I've had to rewind the video because the speaker was Chilean or Spanish, and they speak very low and fast. And I'm a native speaker.

There is also, of course, the small but potentially chaotic problem of vocabulary and slang. Thong in Australia is not the same as thong in America. First floor is different in USA compared to England. Also flashlight and torch, etc.

So, for the natives in the notes, as an ESP-ENG Translation & Interpreting student, thinking you automatically have a privilege just because your language is the most widely used on the internet or that just by virtue of speaking it you'll be able to understand every English post ever is being quite ignorant of your own tongue and also a very typical American-centric delusion.

Cheers!

PD: English isn't the most widely used just because of colonialism (though that is the main reason).

It's also an easy language to learn when compared to other languages (of course, you may find it harder, but that's your individual experience, albeit no less valid) and, due to wars and interaction, it has both Latin and Germanic roots, and since most of the world population speak languages that are Latin or Germanic rooted, having English as the international standard ensures most people can use a feature of the language as an anchor, making the learning process easier.

Sometimes I wonder if native English speakers appreciate how much more comfortable the internet is for them than for the rest of the world

Like, you can go on tumblr and simply read stuff in your mother tongue? Amazing. Go on youtube and you don’t have to replay some sentences ten times to try to understand what they’re saying? Incredible. Look for practically anything on google and know that there will be a fuckton of results that you can read without having to spend half the time looking up words in a dictionary? Fascinating. Make a post or send an ask without panicking that you’ll make a silly mistake or that they won’t understand what you meant? Unbelievable.