Thanks for sharing some of the problems Latvians experience when learning English. It’s very helpful for people who are learning how to teach to know them.
Languages are like arts, they look easy on the eye, but are seriously easy to make mistakes in. Tony Blair once tried to show off his French by telling the French Prime Minister how much he envied him, but ended up saying in French that he wanted to be his boyfriend.
Hot hot dogs are big in Kazakhstan.
I’ve been guilty of similar gaffes myself, mispronouncing the “c” in the word “cūka” had disastrous consequences when I once tried to order pork in a restaurant in my first month here. I even invented new Latvian words like puķot (to pick flowers) which doesn’t exist. However, given that Latvian has verbs like sēņot (to pick mushrooms) and ogot (to pick berries) I don’t think it would be such a bad addition.
Latvia has done amazingly well with foreign languages. Every day I have to tell Latvian civil servants, who already fluently speak…
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Thanks for the reblog, glad you liked. Do you also teach Latvians?
Hi David – I quoted your blog in an essay I wrote while I was training as a TEFL teacher. I’m waiting to get my results.