I am from Germany and my English was so bad in school, that i chose Latin over English as soon as i could. (That does not mean i remember anything in Latin except capilli horrent.). I still find it very hard to learn things I don't need in the same instant.
After i dropped out of school i started programming and thus read lots of English documentation and tutorials. A few years later i exclusively consumed English-speaking media. I started to understand slang and lyrics without any hesitation, but i never spoke nor wrote English to that point.
That's why I started to write this blog. At first it was hard enough to express myself. The German language is especially verbose when it comes to inter-sentence relations. Sentences are weaved together to the extent that even many Germans do not use their own language properly. It is hard to map something as complex and at the same time intuitive as your mother tongue to another language you barely know. But the more i wrote the better it got.
Equipped with my new language skills i could participate in the open source project named ASDT. Many emails to the developer mailing list were written. I had not only a topic to write about but also people that actually read what i wrote and responded to me - a conversation!
When i think or dream about programming now, my thoughts are usually in English. My recent screen-cast was one of the very few times in my Life i spoke English and i think it is quite good for that circumstance.
However i still have lots of errors in my English. Today i discovered my temporary inability to use the negative simple past after re-reading two ticket comments.
To show you what my problem with the hard (negative simple :D) past is, look at this:
- I knew that I thought.
- I didn't
knewknow that i didn'tthoughtthink.
Now in German:
- Ich wusste, dass ich dachte.
- Ich wusste nicht, dass ich nicht dachte.
As you can see we don't use a helper verb for the negative simple past in German. We simple add the negation nicht (= not) and are happy with the past form of the main verb. That makes it quite unintuitive to translate.
I checked all my sent email and found out that i always used the right form except for irregular verbs (especially for to think).
If you are one of my few readers stumbling upon this site and you are still reading and you spot an obvious error, then please, please don't be polite and read over it. Instead add a comment and point it out to me. I am happy with any response i get (and you can be happy with the little monster avatar that is generated from your email address).