We have this wonderful language and we don't appreciate it. That's old-fashioned me, but when I went to school, everyone had elocution lessons, not to sound posh but so you could be understood.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I love English. I learned it from the speeches of Winston Churchill.
My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.
I've always had a penchant for dialects. I remember getting detention and being told, 'Have a think about where doing these funny voices might get you someday.'
I had problems getting my words out. If people spoke directly to me, I understood what they said. But when the grownups got to yakking really fast by themselves, it just sounded like 'oi oi.' I thought grownups had a separate language. I've now figured out I was not hearing the hard consonant sounds.
I appreciate people who try and use language in an interesting way.
All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.
English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.
Some of the substance of English words, I just don't understand at all because the culture's so strange to me.
One thing I can say about the French language is that no one in the world loves their language as much as they do. It doesn't matter if you're close - it still sounds terrible to their ears.
I don't feel I have an issue with listening or understanding English in any sort of way.