Saturday, January 11, 2014

Language & Nuance

All of my conversations in English take place with people whose first language is not English, and I haven't lived in a country where English is the first language for years. So sometimes it takes me a moment to remember the particular nuance with which a word or phrase is used by native speakers, especially where the word or phrase is often used differently by the people with whom I interact daily. Below, in the previous post, I changed "I think not" to "I think it wouldn't be like that" because after posting, I remembered that "I think not" sounds somewhat blunt and cocksure to native speakers. 

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