No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Language is defined by how it is used. You cannot be better than the natives who are using the language. You can use it correctly according to some book and often that book as written by smart people who are avoiding real issues with the language as it is used. It would in those cases be beneficial to everyone if they would follow that book, but if they don't and you do it makes you wrong and a worse speaker.
In English there is nobody who is authorized to write such a book - many try but they don't agree with each others. Most have little influence on the real world.
In French and Spanish (I do not know about any other languages) there are organizations who are blessed by law with the ability to define the language and they do have legal power to force how people speak. They are sometimes forced to accept a "bad" addition because everyone is using it to the point where they cannot fight it despite the power of law they have behind them.
You cannot say your English is better than many Americans. That makes no sense. Unless you specifically mean English as it is spoken in some other part of the world. There are several different major ways English is spoken in the US, Australia has their own way of speaking (I don't know if this is shared with New Zealand or if they are different), and England has many different ways of speaking the same language. However if you are in some part of the world where a significant number of people speak a language from birth you cannot be better than them at it . India doesn't have many native speakers, but some native speakers are raising their kids English first and so you can probably find a significant population there that is native and has very different ways of speaking.
I believe they were talking about things like knowing the difference between "your" and "you're"
That is written language which is sometimes minimally related to spoken languge.
I imagine they're saying that they speak/write over a 6th grade reading level for example, making them "better" at the language than those who read below their level
By your definition an english teacher also can't be better than a 3 year-old, because they're both native speakers. So the 3yo would babble something and by definition no one can be better at english.
And I'm not sure if you can smash your forehead on the keyboard and say, this is now an english sentence by definition... Due to lack of a state authority... It's some consensus what is accepted as english language and what's not.
It's certainly correct that there are multiple variants. There is more than one english.
Your typical adult can make themselves understood by their community better than a three year old which makes them better - not until around seven are kids fully able to communicate (when their adult teeth grow in and they can pronounce all sounds)
of course some english teachers use 'big words' and so are not understood. in that case I'd call a four year old better. (three year olds generally are worse)