The Old Folks Home

[bamadude]

Tecate is my cerveza of choice.

i dont always drink. But when i do...

 

[Alaskan]

When I was first being interviewed for a job in the USA I was asked by a nursing director where am I from. I said Australia. She told me I speak American very well.....

Maybe she just meant that you understood much of our slang.


Sort of how it is impressive that @vehve not just speaks English, but is pretty good at American phrases etc.

 

[ozexpat]

A friend of mine's father is from French Guiana. He happens to be Black and comes from the Maroon culture. You would not believe how many people think French Guiana is in Africa - and not just Americans.

Guiana / Ghana is an easy mistake. Papillion is a good read and comes to my head every time I hear of French Guiana

 

[ozexpat]

Maybe she just meant that you understood much of our slang.


Sort of how it is impressive that @vehve
not just speaks English, but is pretty good at American phrases etc.

No she meant English and thought Australians spoke German

 

[Bunnylady]

When I was first being interviewed for a job in the USA I was asked by a nursing director where am I from. I said Australia. She told me I speak American very well.....

I joke about being bilingual - I speak English and, well, English.

 

[ozexpat]

I am not America bashing. I chose to be an American after all. I am just disappointed in what should be a much greater country than it is

 

[ChickenCanoe]

When I was first being interviewed for a job in the USA I was asked by a nursing director where am I from. I said Australia. She told me I speak American very well.....

Being from Australia, how many times have you been asked if you speak German?

I ain't got no problems with speaking proper

I make mistakes but usually catch them on a reread. Many edits.

i dont always drink. But when i do...

When I do, in Mexico or a Mexican restaurant, it's Tecate.

There are 2 major cerveza distributors in Mexico. Depending on the part of the country, if a restaurant carries brands like Corona and Pacifico, they may not be allowed to carry Tecate, Bohemia, Dos XX or Superior.

Maybe she just meant that you understood much of our slang.


Sort of how it is impressive that @vehve not just speaks English, but is pretty good at American phrases etc.

Good point.

 

[Alaskan]

As to people in other countries being better at geography... the two supposedly well educated Taiwanese boys that I taught this summer could not find Taiwan or Japan on a globe.

Also, the amount of information that we could all know, is mind boggling. No one person can know it all, you need to decide what is most important, and needs to be learned.

The example of the nurse who knows about everything in the medical field, but has no idea what a rooster is, is a good example.

Now, I do think that you need to have at least a basic idea of geography. I don't think that you need to have all wars and the players and reasons for them memorized. However, the really big ones need to be know, as well as their general dates. I think it is more important to understand the basic strategy, mismanagement, politics, and tactics of war than a list of all wars fought.

And, probably, with just the small number of people on this thread, we wouldn't be able to agree on what should be on the "must know" list, except for the super basic.

 

[tnspursfan09]

Heineken. Or a dark lager. But my favorite is Shiner Boch

 

[The Yakima Kid]

When I was first being interviewed for a job in the USA I was asked by a nursing director where am I from. I said Australia. She told me I speak American very well.....

What part of the country were you in? That is surreal.

What makes it funnier is that I worked in a firm where we had a number of English, Scots, Australian, and South African engineers. At one meeting I used a word that is pronounced very differently in commonwealth nations than in the US. My boss, an Englishman looked at me, as did the others at the table, and suggested that we were "one culture separated by our common language."

I used to long for an American English - Commonwealth English dictionary since so many things have different names or radically different pronunciations or spellings. Lorry, terrace house, ZEB-ra which is spelled Zebra and in the US is a ZEE-bra, also spelled Zebra..

You speak English; we speak American English, a dialect heavily influence by the fact that the single largest European immigrant to the US was the Germans, who seem to have had a significant impact on how we pronounce words.