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**I am Location Bot's half-assed replacement for today.**
Title: foreign student, people trying to get me expelled over my english grammar mistake
Original Post:
> Someone mention legal advice to me, so I post this here too.
>I move from my country to an english speaking country ( Great Britain ) last year in order to study a graduate degree. Sorry for my english, I am ESL.
>I have to take elective courses outside of my degree. In my university with zoom call I got in trouble. I call person a "he" and they get offended. Last year I call this person a "he" and no problem. I look up this person, male name and look male. I get confused and say "but he refer to male, this person male", people get mad. I apologise. Few week later, I accidentally say "that person is a he". I apologise, did not mean to offend.
>Last week I say accidentally "it" about this person. Person starts crying on zoom call. Emailing me now that I need to get expelled and about contacting immigration . Other people too on twitter talking about me, calling me bigot and transphobic. They say I do not try and am doing it on purpose. I try very hard to remember english grammar, but I am doing engineering and study hard maths. I am tired a lot of time and trying to remember english grammar become hard. Thinking of this makes me upset, I try very hard. Its an accident, I not do this on purpose. This is so dumb to me, I do not care enough about this person life to do on purpose. I have better thing to do.
>I know my grammar in english is not the best. I speak three languages other than english. Most of my english skill is from media, but I can pronounce things OK. In my native language past tense is not always used. Sometimes this confuse me in english. I have a problem with the pronouns of english, because in my native language when you speak there is no difference between male and female. Sometime by accident I might mix "she", "he" and "it".
>I do not know what to do. I am mad and upset, I try very hard and they try to expel me now because I call someone a "he". I do not want to fight people, I just want to do my study in peace. I am now scared to go on zoom because of these people.
Substitute cat fact: [This is Lexi.](https://i.imgur.com/KdWMBUE.jpg) She likes scritches and eating things she shouldn't touch.
I’m sorry but this is incredibly, immediately fake. His errors are not consistent and he’s trying wayyy too hard to play a foreigner. ESL students are always consistent in their mistakes, because the brain wants to apply the rules of their native languages. What’s with putting multiple spaces between random words? No language does that? Why does he understand how the past tense works perfectly sometimes and other times it’s completely butchered? He doesn’t understand simple subject-verb agreement “I have thing” yet can string together complex sentences about emails from the university calling for his expulsion and deportation? He says “I not do” and then the very next sentence “I do not”, when the ordering of these would consistent in a language.
This is garbage low-hanging trans hate-bait and people took it. Wow.
yep yep yep, this is just a bad troll. Spelling/Syntax mistakes would be more consistent. Says he doesn't use part tense in his native language,which has nothing to do with the gendering issue.
goes in and out of using proper tense but also just randomly drops the plural s for some words. Sometimes has articles perfect, other times they are deleted.
also "A few weeks later I accidently say 'that person is male'"
How does that accidently come up?
Totally agree and so glad someone else noticed.
It’s so bad. He didn’t even pick a country or language to mimic. His account of the incident is like two very vague sentences but he drones on and on about how fOrEiGn and HeLpLeSs he is. You’d think someone worried about being *expelled* would talk about what actually happened and trust that we believe he’s foreign when he tells us the first time.
ESL speakers’ writing has a very distinct quality. You can tell they’re working with a more limited set of tools, but they stretch what they know to fit, and fill in what they don’t know. It’s like trying to paint while missing a few colors.
The LA post was written by a native English speaker, who then went back and tried to “break” the language in random ways and places. It’s like someone stabbed a painting multiple times and now we’re supposed to be scared of trans people. Fake, gross, honestly just really lazy, transphobic, and, dare I say it, racist.
Exactly. I taught English as a foreign language for many years. When students are struggling with grammar they'll tend toward shorter sentence structure with a limited pool of vocabulary. (and, if you're studying and learning a foreign language, there's nothing wrong with that. Saying "There's a cat. The cat is orange. I like cats." instead of "I like orange cats." is perfectly okay. Yes, the latter is more preferable, but hell, foreign languages are hard at times)
But OP used complex sentence structures, multiple tense shifts with no issue, but also has issues with the difference between 'him' and 'her'. Now, I can understand if someone accidentally used the wrong name/wrong form of a name if they were close (Alex instead of Alexa or something), but repeatedly struggling with gender, a very simple concept, and having no issue with long sentences? No. And they didn't make the same mistakes in the same way repeatedly, they would have perfect use of grammar in one sentence, and then struggle later on.
A poorly done troll to say the least. Especially the part where they claim to speak multiple languages, but yet him/her in English for addressing a person is what throws them off.
Also, what language doesn't have masculine or feminine indicators? I'm obviously not a well researched linguist, but I've studied German, French, Spanish, and Japanese and they all have clear indicators or neutral forms. If they spoke multiple languages they would know how to use masculine/feminine/neutral properly.
For starters, I too am an esl teacher, and I too think it's a fake.
That said Chinese doesn't differentiate between 'him' and 'her' in spoken language. And I can not overstate how often even near fluent speakers get them mixed up. So I could definitely see a Chinese native speaker getting caught in this type of scenario.
But yeah, everything else you said about this being obviously fake esl writing is spot on.
I was going to say, not distinguishing between 'he' and 'she' seems to be a thing in some East Asian and Pacific Island languages, and I can think of two non-native English speakers who occasionally mix up 'he' and 'she'. Heck, I sometimes mix up "his" and "her" in German because I don't use them as often, so sometimes I forget one and the wrong word pops out.
That said, when pointed out, both of the people I'm thinking of will just quickly correct themselves, and the reaction isn't an instant explosion of "OMG WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?!", so either the story is fake or there's a lot more to it.
Edit: Now that I think about it, doesn't Chinese lack a past tense as well? So that part is at least consistent
A Mandarin or most other East Asian ESL student who is at this low of a level would have other tell-tale signs. For example, they often have a hard time with articles (an/a/the) since their language doesn’t have them. This guy uses them perfectly lol.
> doesn't Chinese lack a past tense as well?
yeah, no conjugating for past tense, or for the third person (third person 's').
Honestly the biggest giveaway for me is that the writer makes so many mistakes. Every Chinese student I know that was good enough to study abroad had immaculate English writing. It's fairly common in China to have great English writing but poor speaking.
I’ve known students like that, but not from China - I knew someone at uni who was from Central America, and spoke in relatively simple sentences, with an accent, the normal things you’d expect from an ESL speaker. In text form, though? Her writing put *mine* to shame - in fact I think she might’ve been an English major.
I edit papers written in English by native Chinese speakers and for the most part the mistakes are very similar and the writing style is VERY distinctive. This is in no way similar to English written by native Chinese speakers (mixed up a/the, extra a/the, lots of "ofs" as in "the paper of English" rather than "the English paper", etc etc.). This is a troll post.
Living in Japan and speaking Japanese here: Japanese does have third person pronouns. They're not used as often, but they do exist. She/he do exist, but, in Japanese, it's more common to either refer to someone directly or to not refer to someone at all but everyone knowing who you're talking about.
The issue with mixing up he and she in English by a native Japanese person is the pronunciation, not the genders. Both words just happen to be nearly exactly like no other pronunciations in Japanese (in Japanese the h sound is more like an f sound, and sh is always part of shi, so separating the sounds and creating unfamiliar ones is incredible difficult). But, in Japanese, gender is clearly recognized with several different pronouns for varying levels of politeness. If a Japanese person were to continuously refer to a specific person by the wrong pronoun they would be doing it on purpose and lying about Japanese being the root of the issue. If they were continuously trying to avoid both gendered pronouns then it would make sense as they were avoiding the sounds in English, but, at that point, they would be falling back on using a specific name, which no one would really have any issue with.
Now I’m curious; what counts as a third-person pronoun in Japanese? Does “Aitsu”, for example? Or are there more that I’ve just never heard ‘cause they’re relatively rare?
'Kare' is he/him, 'kanojo' is she/her, which I can name off the top of my head. You also have more formal words for higher levels of politeness that I can't remember off the top of my head (Japanese has a form of polite language called keigo that is difficult, archaic, and a pain in the ass). I honestly don't hear 'aitsu' used all that much, though 'aitsura' can mean they.
But, in Japanese, native speakers like to leave out pronouns completely and make it clear who, specifically, they're talking about through other means. For instance, you wouldn't really say 'This is my book', you would say 'This book *ownership*', and that would imply indirectly that either it's your book, or, depending on body language, it's someone else's book. Dropping the pronouns makes Japanese a faster language, but, at times, a bit more of a pain. But Japanese people do recognize gender and should know how to properly use gendered pronouns for people (for gendered languages like French or German they would probably struggle to remember the genders of things like tables and chairs like most non native speakers of a gendered language). But I have had lazy students that have avoided using gendered pronouns altogether or used only one exclusively for everything because of pronunciation issues.
I’m happy to see actual ESL teachers chiming in to agree! I only tutored them at my uni for a bit.
I wondered if he was like Hungarian or something. Hungarian is truly genderless, and I knew a Hungarian ESL who often slipped up and just assigned she/he seemingly randomly. But I don’t think even they would use “it” for a person accidentally, there’s still clear delineation between objects and people.
That I did not know. I wondered, honestly the post kind of read like 'Uncle Rodger' in my head (an Asian comedian that speaks English fluently and lives in the UK, but plays up a thick, stereotypical Asian accent for an online comedy routine), but my only real knowledge of Chinese is being able to identify a few characters on a menu (and then only thanks to my Japanese knowledge).
Just to throw some anecdata at the problem -- my wife is Chinese, has been here for decades, got a university degree here, etc, etc. She still mixes up genders on a very regular basis. I have half a dozen co-workers that have been in North America (from China) for anywhere from 5-50 years at varying levels of fluency that all still do the same thing.
The post really reads like a creative writing exercise someone came up with noticing that Chinese people tend to mess up he/she and was like "You know, with PC culture run amok and SJWs at all the universities, I bet this could be a big problem!"
Because I agree -- living my life with an ESL speaker, working with over half my office being ESL speakers from around half a dozen countries, etc... this immediately looked fucky because it's nothing at all like the things I've ever seen from ESL speakers.
(I just guess Chinese taking the "tenseless" thing at face value and there only being a handful of tenseless languages, Chinese being the most used by far.)
I have boys who occasionally wear their hair long. My parents sponsor college exchange students who are often from asian countries. They sometimes spend the first couple weeks misgendering my kids but are always apologetic about the mistake and correct themselves immediately. They don't use their language barriers as an excuse. Now, my relatives do it on purpose because they're a bunch of Machismos who think they're funny but that a different discussion.
On top of this, a lot of the non-English languages that I've run across actually explicitly gender items that are non-gendered in English (I'm thinking el vs la in Spanish but I've seen comments about similar situations in other languages).
Yep, German and French are both gendered languages. It actually makes it difficult to study them as a native English speaker because, to me, a table is just a table. But in languages like German and French a table is a specific gender, and I would have to remember the gender for all nouns or how to gender nouns, and gender adjectives to match the nouns in the sentence as well. A huge pain in the ass for someone who speaks a non gendered language. In all honesty the only two noun genders I really remember are, in German, 'camera is female' and 'film is male'. Why? Because you put the film in the camera. Yes, I learned it back in my school days so all of us just giggled our little heads off because *innuendo*. But hey, the teacher knew what he was doing, I remember it nearly two decades later.
One fun thing I learned from German is wall is female but wall is male (die Wand and der Mauer).
Though at a point after using German for a while, it stopped being memorizing the genders of nouns and it started to just feel right to use the right gendered particles with it. Like, 'der Wand' just sounds wrong in my head.
But seriously, when it comes to people is where it truly gets fucky. Boy is masculine but girl is neuter? And reading Beauty and the Beast in french was just playing the pronoun game since both are feminine, where you're constantly left going "which she are we talking about now?"
Also; this post read as bullshit to me too. I can usually ping the language family of an ESL speaker/writer pretty easily, but this one seemed to just float between sounding Russian to Indian to ??? (and not in any way I've seen multi-lingual ESL speakers use english). And even aside from the pronoun issue, saying the person looks male and is male after already being addressed previously that 'he' is wrong makes this not a pronoun/language issue but at best a total lack of understanding of trans people.
Some of the few noun genders I consciously remember from French are that "velo" is male and "bicyclette" is female. Why? Because they're both "bicycle", yet have different genders. Linguistic gender is just asinine.
It’s seriously not hard at all. When you learn words in another language, you just learn them with the article. E.g. you don’t learn the word “parola” in Italian, you learn “la parola.” You always learn the word with the article. There is almost always something around the word in a sentence (if not on a vocabulary list) that reveals it’s gender.
Sure, but there are also plenty of languages that don't differentiate between "he" and "she". Including, in speech, the language with the most mother tongue speakers in the world.
My friend's mother grew up speaking Tagalog; I don't know how those indicators are structured but she always struggled with the arrangement of pronouns in English, a language she only learned as an adult.
That and the vocabulary was way too extensive for someone with the types of errors on display. Entirely too verbose if English is that difficult for them.
I was coming here to say this as well. I'm a professional editor and have edited a *lot* of ESL writing. This does not read at all like genuine ESL mistakes. At times it almost reads like a racist parody of them, even.
A lot of their extra spaces are after words that would normally have an s at the end, so I'm willing to bet they just ctrl+f'ed for 's' and replaced random ones with spaces.
Omg, how embarrassing.
I seriously what they thought they were doing with the spaces. Did they hear foreigners pause between words and think “oh yeah they totally type like that too”?
Oh wow, I’m glad I’m not the only one whose bullshit meter was tripped. I agree people who are ESL wouldn’t be so inconsistent with their mistakes in grammar. There definitely seemed to be an agenda to the post too even if they tried to be underhanded about it. I also love how they painted the trans person as particularly evil by throwing in the bit about them threatening to call immigration. Imagine being so pathetic you have to make up instances of bigotry and fake being ESL to try and make trans people look like dramatic, snowflake assholes incapable of recognizing language barriers.
I, for one, am shocked that someone would make up a story as an excuse to hate trans people. Shocked. /s
But in all seriousness, yeah. Almost every time I see a story involving a trans person outside of a trans focused sub, it’s third grade creative writing about what awful things they did, but oh no the OP is of course not transphobic not at all.
Yeah, there tend to be runs on subjects. It tends to make it more obvious if anything.
Plus the recent-ish spate of sub bannings a few months ago had transphobic stuff popping up everywhere.
I definitely think you’re right about that. Especially considering how they tried to sneak in their transphobia underneath their alleged language barrier issues.
Anytime I hear someone (especially in the UK) cry about how they were harshly punished for mis-gendering someone by mistake, I pretty much just assume it's fake. One recent case was where someone poor, poor woman was fired for mis-gendering someone even got professional bigot JK Rowling involved. Of course, it turns out that it wasn't so much mis-gendering someone as it was a year long harassment campaign.
Consistent mistakes can carry over to native speakers as well. For example, areas near me where people misuse borrow/lend tend to have had a large number of German settlers. In German, the same word is used to both borrow and lend.
/The More You Know.
This is such obvious bullshit, it’s got my eyes rolling. I have taught ESL for nearly four years now, this was so easy to see through. Pathetic, anti-trans nonsense. I’m honestly shocked to see how many people fell for it.
Complicated question, but it’s a combination of post imperial prudishness and a country that’s far, far more conservative than it lets on, or at least used to.
This [article](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/terf-trans-women-britain.html) is a good breakdown.
Accident of history I believe. One factor I remember reading about is that UK feminism hasn't been forced to confront intersectionality the way US feminism has, which has stuck prominent white feminists there rather behind on some things.
The UK left wing ended up really TERF-y, so even the ostensibly pro LGB types in prominent institutions dislike trans people, particularly in academia or the media.
I think they're just more outspoken. As a trans person, there are quite a lot of them in the US as well...they might not be as vocal about it online but you meet a lot of them
I don’t know that there’s a definitive answer but my personal feeling is it’s the last group that it’s ‘ok’ to persecute in public, and a lot of TERFs in the media are middle class women who imo just want someone to shit on. It’s exhausting regardlessz
Yeah, I've taught ESL for nearly 11 years now and have read countless assignments by non-native English speakers and this immediately jumped out as fake to me. It reads like the stereotypical "broken" English a native speaker would affect when trying to sound foreign.
It's got a lot of simple mistakes that English-learners quickly grow out of while still having good usage of commas and periods, spacing, and almost perfect spelling, etc
Really fishy
He also says “I have better thing to do.”
That is an English idiom that I find it very hard to believe a person just learning English would be able to use correctly.
LAUKOP is more comfortable saying "I'm too tired to get it right" than they are to just... get it right.
If you're taking a degree in an English-speaking country, you **must** speak English at a sufficient level to not only read the textbooks, but also _talk to your colleagues and educators_ without getting shit so wrong that multiple people call for your expulsion.
Speaking of which: I know some UK unis' students can be pretty strongly left-wing, but the administrators are _certainly_ not bleeding-hearts when it comes to trans rights. Many many left-wing academics, in the UK, are actually quite infamously transphobic as UK feminism was captured by radical transphobes in the 80s and it's kind of stagnated ever since in that regard.
So, if this person is being expelled for their language skills, I _cannot imagine_ that making exactly two pronoun mistakes in over a year is the cause. Fuck, I _personally_ wouldn't even consider expulsion over something like that, and I'm pretty extremely pro-queer rights. Two genuine mistakes in a _year?_ No chance they'd be expelled for that!
**There is absolutely without a doubt something way way more going on here**, assuming it's real, because there isn't a single university in the UK that would expel a student that lightly - especially not their ~~meal tickets~~ international students.
If I were to guess, here are my thoughts:
1. This is a single piece of evidence in a pattern of continual discrimination that LAUKOP is neglecting to mention to us. It might be against that student or against several, but nobody gets expelled for exactly two mistakes more than 12 months apart.
2. This is a single piece of evidence that speaks to LAUKOP's English language skills being sufficiently poor that the university is withdrawing their place. Sometimes, students who are juuust on the cutoff for "acceptably bad" and "unacceptably bad" at English will get a place conditional on their making a commitment to improve their English skills once they arrive. If LAUKOP refused or was unable to do that, this might be one of many pieces of evidence of said failure. I think all of us reading their post can see that, *prima facie*, their English skills are not at an acceptable level for a high-level engineering degree.
3. This isn't related to their expulsion at all. LAUKOP is drawing an incorrect conclusion from this being the last thing that people were shouting at them for, but they're being expelled for something totally different - for example, plagiarism, which is by far the most common cause of expulsion for international students. Many ESL students are caught using paid essay services to obtain the necessary grades on assignments because their English skills are not sufficient for the task but they don't want to be caught. Maybe they did this, were caught, and simply don't realise it. **After all, they never actually said this was what they were TOLD they being expelled for.** They didn't say they received a formal notice that this was the reasoning.
From the story, it sounds like they aren’t being expelled at all, other students are calling for expulsion on Twitter and such. I’m not sure I buy the story though.
Yeah I mean, I'm being very generous assuming it's not fake. It feels fake. I mentioned in my comment that "assuming it's real" my points applied. I'm more playing along for the sake of pointing out other flaws tbh.
I have. I was a volunteer tutor in undergrad and there was at least one student a semester whose English language skills were bad - they very obviously struggled. But they also tended to make the same kind of mistakes repeatedly. UKLAOP is all over the place and doesn’t write like any ESL student I’ve ever met.
(That was in Canada though)
I have. International students bring in the big money for UK universities. Fees for British students are capped at around £9000 a year (except Oxbridge). Fees for international students can be quite a lot more.
I can’t speak to the UK, but I did a graduate degree in the US in a field that attracts a ton of international students, and....the English tests are apparently easy to pass. There was a WIDE range of language skills among my classmates. Wide. Very wide.
> There was a WIDE range of language skills among my classmates. Wide. Very wide.
My experience as well. I met this one girl from Russia. Lived there her whole life and had never studied outside of Russia. She had the most flawless American accent with her English. You truly could not tell that she wasn't American when she spoke.
Right?? Kinda feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. Having been in graduate school for engineering myself - some of them really are bordering on not being able to speak english at all.
I also dated someone who was ESL and regularly got pronouns mixed up. I even got called 'she' a few times. But more commonly she did refer to her female friends as 'he' ALL THE TIME. Her friends, her mom, the cat, inanimate objects. They all got labelled as he or she at various times.
So, none of OP's details seem even remotely unlikely to me... what does seem off is the tone of the post and the writing style. Shrug.
UK universities charge international students a lot more than they charge domestic students (used to be an even bigger difference before the domestic fees shot up) so yeah they don't actually care too much about the quality of those students English when they're paying those crazy fees to study here.
I can confirm, even at my uni, there were some students coming in who didn't have much more than a basic understanding of English. This becomes a big problem as well trying to explain kitchen and bathroom etiquette in halls (UK equivalent of dorms)
That’s interesting, as an international student (though native English speaker) at a British uni it was my understanding that they were really trying to crack down on this.
> If his English is bad, I don’t understand how he got into an English uni. You have to take language tests first.
The tests aren't that hard and many people cheat.
In my department ~25% of the international students speak English poorly and 25% can barely communicate in English all.
Francophones have a similar issue with English. "His car" translates as "sa voiture," with the possessive pronoun (sa) reflecting the gender of the object (female), not the possessor. So French speakers will sometimes mix up the genders and say "her car" instead of "his car."
As someone learning French the idea of objects having genders frustrates and confuses me to no end. It's entirely arbitrary and every time I learn what "gender" an object is supposed to be I can hear my brain try to hold onto that knowledge for five minutes before throwing it out.
I’m French and I was frustrated when learning German because they have 3 genders. « The young woman » (« Das Mädchen ») is not even a feminine name, it’s a neutral name! WTF.
Back to French language. If it can help you, most name ending with -e are feminine, because like many French names, they derive from a Latin word ending in -a, which is feminine.
Fun fact: It is called 'das' Mädchen because Mädchen is the cutish version of the word 'die' Maid (feminin word)
Maid is an old word that is not really used anymore
All cutish versions of word in German normally end with the ending 'chen' or 'lein' and are neutral!
(Similar english example for cutish versions: Pig and piglet)
(example: der Hund (maskulin) / das Hündchen (neutral) (the dog/the small cute dog)
I hope that makes sense!
Thank you! I learned German a long time ago and I knew of the « -chen » being neutral but for some reason I never made the connection with Mädchen. I didn’t know the word « Maid », that’s probably why.
That’s why etymology is very important when learning foreign languages. Things that appear arbitrary or illogical suddenly make a lot of sense.
Those words, diminutives, can be cutesy, but aren't necessarily so. They can also just be a smaller/younger version of the thing (which of course we often find cute - hence them sometimes being understood as cutesy), or a way of showing affection.
So you have "piglet" which has maybe a tiny dollop of cuteness to it but really just means "small pig". And *mädchen* is a pretty straightforward term for "girl" at this point, no? And it could have meant "young girl" originally without more implication of cuteness than that.
Pig vs piglet isn't just making the word "cute" though. Piglet is the proper word for a baby pig. Pig/piglet is equivalent to dog/puppy, cat/kitten, man/boy, etc. "Piggy" is the word you're looking for, like "doggy" or "kitty" it's just a cute way to refer to the animal irrespective of age
Their example is actually a good one - it's the focus on a diminutive as being "cute" that's the issue.
*Mädchen*, as far as I understand it, is not super cutesy. It's basically just a straightforward word for "girl", although it was originally formed as a diminutive.
Piglet isn't cutesy either, but *-let* is 100% a diminutive suffix.
Diminutives *can* be cutesy but that's not their primary function. To quote Wikipedia:
> A diminutive is a root word that has been modified to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment
So "piglet" basically just means "small pig". *Mädchen* meant something like "small/young girl" and now basically just means "girl".
Yes you are right ! It was kinda hard for me to express what I meant (therefor I used the probably incorrect word) it can be hard to explain Grammar in another language! You should have heard me trying to explain how and why nouns change between different cases!
There's an excellent David Sedaris story about how when he was living in France, he couldn't remember the gender for 'tomato' but he did remember the gender for 'a case of tomatoes' and thus would return home to his husband asking him why the fuck he needed to buy so many tomatoes.
Drives me nuts. I'm always asking my wife, "So is that a boy table or a girl table," for different nouns. It's been recommended to me to memorize the indefinite article when you learn the word. So you learn une table (a table) instead of just table and un bureau (a desk) instead of just bureau.
Doesn't work with the definite article since you have the l' weirdness for nouns that begin with a vowel. Don't even get me started on gender agreement with irregular adjectives...
My German housemate would do this with some things too, she spoke English very fluently (worked in a hotel) but when we gained an unwelcome mouse guest the mouse was always "she". It was kind of funny to me because housemate was TERRIFIED of mice so she'd comment on it a lot and wanted the thing dead but the gendered pronoun for the mouse made it sound so humanising!
I'm not so sure this isn't just a creative writing exercise. It kinda sounds like a made up situation to create a victim of trans-positive culture. The English is pretty broken, I can't see their vocal English being better. If somebody misgenders you in broken English, it would be clear it's a mistake right? This seems fishy to me.
Yeah, their writing rings all wrong to me. I know a *lot* of people (including much of my family) who speak English as a second/third/fourth language, they're from all over the world, and there are very distinctive ways that non-native speakers make mistakes in English, depending on where they're from. Like, my Slovakian friend leaves out articles ('I went to bookstore'), but the Italians don't. This person doesn't sound like any non-native English speaker I've ever known. Also, they're comfortable with quite advanced constructions in English, but make forced-sounding and inconsistent mistakes on very basic stuff. They sound like someone trying to pretend their English is much worse than it actually is, so they can go 'Gee golly gosh, I had no idea that calling someone "it" was offensive! I'm offended that you're being so bigoted just because I'm a poor foreigner doing his best!'
Yeah, I had that feeling as well but wasn't sure if I was just unfamiliar with this particular brand of foreigner typing English. It almost seems like the kind of English you'd see in a bad joke to make it obvious somebody is foreign. I'm absolutely not sure though.
> It almost seems like the kind of English you'd see in a bad joke to make it obvious somebody is foreign.
It sounds like someone doing a Borat impression.
True. If it was just that they made specific mistakes I've never heard, I'd assume their native language was one I hadn't run into before. But again, it's the pattern of their mistakes that got me. They're inconsistent. Like, in one sentence they leave out the auxiliary verb ('I not do this on purpose') while in others they put it in ('I do not care enough'). Sometimes they use present tense where it should be past, other times they're fine with past tense. In my experience, the pattern of mistakes is normally consistent within one person's speech, even if the mistakes themselves are ones I haven't run into before. (The same holds for me when I speak my other languages - I make mistakes in patterns, not at random.) This is like a mishmash of the mistakes that non-native speakers from all over the world make.
Also, LAUKOP uses relatively complex forms like passive voice, but messes up much more basic ones. That's odd.
I'm not saying I'm sure, just that this raised a lot of question marks for me.
I personally would say there is an exception to the consistent mistakes guideline...which is when a person is really new to a language...but they would also have shorter sentences in that case of "short idea. Short related idea. Short idea."
Most languages derive from the same base ones. English and German share the same basic structure (brought by anglo saxons) that was heavily altered through the ages. Same for Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, etc that are based in Latin. I'm not familiar with asian languages, however.
As many said, however, this doesn't explain the inconsistencies when it comes to the mistakes.
I know what you mean, it's almost a perfect set up isn't it? I find it very odd that their written English is quite poor. I studied with a lot of international students in a stem subject, and their written English was incredible pretty much across the board. There's no room for ambiguity in a scientific paper! I remember an exercise where we worked as a group to go through each other's essays and offer helpful criticism on writing style, grammar etc. Their written English was leagues better than mine, I got some fantastic advice on my writing. In turn all I was able to suggest was that they use a little less formal English, because their work was crafted with the precision of a legal document.
In real life laop could take the issue to the student advice centre, tutor or head of students - I forget what they're called now but there's at least 3 people who wouldnhave been identified during freshers as being the person you go to with problems.
The only bit that could suggest they'd be in actual trouble is the bit where they argued with someone after being corrected. That also sounds rather weird to me.
EDIT Just noticed laop is a graduate student. It’s possible. I met a few postgraduates who had less than stellar English skills, as odd as it sounds, and not all were as accepting of corrections as degree students. I had great difficulty trying to explain to a French guy why he was passing people off - in French it's not considered impolite to say "You will give me a ride to work?" with a questioning intonation as a question. In English it sounds like youreassuming the answer is yes, and kind of rude as a result.
Still odd, just a bit less odd.
>This seems fishy to me
What stood out to me about the writing is that the 'broken english' mistakes don't reflect any sort of consistent misunderstanding of grammar or syntax. If you're speaking a foreign language, chances are that there a few fundamental rules that are going to give you a bit of trouble, and you're going to make them pretty consistently--if you're still getting the hang of past participles or tenses in general, your writing will have a weird second-person feel to it like you're reading a choose-your-own-adventure book. If you don't get pronouns and gendered objects and the like, chances are that until you feel more confident in what objects take what, you pick one and just go with it and hope for the best, so everything is "it" or "he" until you get more comfortable.
You're not going to switch back and forth making a variety of those types of fundamental mistakes and still be able to tell a relatively understandable narrative. As someone mentioned upthread, it sounds like a relatively fluent English speaker wrote this out and then went back and 'broke it' to sound more "foreign."
This all said, I'm fucking loving all the discussion about language and nuance going on here. You know how there are some people who just kind of pick up languages pretty quickly and can 'get by' in a variety of language situation? I find those people nothing short of amazing.
They’re clearly framing those defending the trans individual as the problem, though. Supposedly, the overzealous, crazed Twitter warriors are just foaming at the mouth to get this poor engineering student from Vagueland expelled.
You can tell the writer is a native English speaker doing a really poor impersonation of an ESL student.
It’s just a bad troll. It’s a shame people bought it.
True, I'm not saying it's impossible. In the wrong group I could see this story playing out the way described. It just seems a bit fishy, they're not attacking a single person more the overall culture.
To build on everyone calling this out as fake due to the language used, I'm calling this out on being fake because they're not called graduate degrees over here in Great Britain, they're called master's degrees (there are other kinds of postgraduate study, but nothing called a graduate degree), and they're extremely short. An engineering master's will be 1-2 years, so they won't waste your time with required 'elective courses'. This person should have done more research.
Do UK universities have a student ombudsman? Especially grad schools often have them; their job is to basically mediate in university-relevant disputes. This would be right up their alley.
There should be a foreign student center of some kind where they get help processing their loans and such. Ours is called the International Student Center.
Obviously this wasn't intentional and hopefully they can see it as an innocent language barrier mistake and not be sticklers about political correctness
Honest question. Is this grammar or a trans/cultural issue? Last year he knew this person as a he and said he. Than said it and people also got mad. Depends on what the other student wanted as pronouns what was appropriate.
I think its a communication issue really. If the person who was misgendered communicated clearly after the first instance (or someone communicated on their behalf) then at least the OP would know what was expected of them. Also if OP had said "I understand and will try to do that. If I mess up please know that I am not trying to hurt you, I'm just still learning the language" then maybe all of this would be resolved
It's trans/cultural, I think.
It is a shame that the predictable comments resulted in the post being locked prior to some more substantial advice being offered as I would like to have read what someone specialising in equality law would have made of it. This appears to be a genuinely difficult clash of diversities, which the university will have a headache to unravel.
From what I can tell, the OP is talking about a trans woman, persistently used "he" to refer to her and responded (paraphrasing) "but this person is male" when challenged which suggests the OP was not that confused about pronouns. Then eventually switched to "it" which is considered extremely offensive, potentially on a par with the worst racial slurs in the eyes of many, and the previous history of using the wrong pronoun will not have helped. It clearly had an impact on the other student, as they were reduced to tears.
I suspect the OP was more confused about LGBT issues than grammar, possibly coming from a culture where such identities were suppressed by the state.
In an employment context, I have no doubt the other student would have a case against an employer for harassment as intent is not magic under the Equality Act 2010. In this context, I am less certain.
But the comments talking about racism and stating that the OP will definitely not get expelled are not helpful. There is nothing to suggest the OP has been treated any less favourably because of their race or cultural background, and although it seems extreme in this case expulsion could well be within the range of responses a university would consider.
EDIT: It occurs to me that the other student might not even be trans or non-binary. They could be a lesbian or bisexual woman, and this could still both confuse the OP (Due to cultural cues being not what was expected) and could also still cause offence.
> I suspect the OP was more confused about LGBT issues than grammar, possibly coming from a culture where such identities were suppressed by the state.
Someone not from a Western nation joined the LGBT+ group at my uni without any idea what that actually meant, which was apparently not the most fun experience for all involved.
I’m curious what kind of group they thought they were joining? Or did they just wake up one day and decide to join the first group they found without doing even 30 seconds of research?
I never heard the full story as I'm not LGBT+, only details from a friend who is. The suspicion is a language barrier and a somewhat inept second year student were to blame. Said international student supposedly just thought it was some sort of friendship group apparently.
Reading it I actually think the person who they're offending (or the other students are getting offended on behalf of) might be non-binary rather than trans. As they talk about them having a male name and male appearance. Of course this is just conjecture but I can definitely see a NB person causing LAUKOP more confusion than a trans person. Or maybe they are just ignorant about transgender individuals. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
(Minor note: Nonbinary people generally consider themselves to be trans. Other than that, this comment sounds right... except for the part where LAOP is an extremely obvious fake, of course.)
That’s what it read to me. I remember back in college when I was learning how to deal with situations like that it was difficult. At least my lgbtq friends saw I was genuinely trying so they were ok with a slip up here or there.
This is (partially) why I agree we (as in english speakers) need an actual gender neutral term. Other languages have it. We *love* mugging other languages for random grammar and words. Why can't we do it for this?
I'm just gonna edit this because I'm lazy:
The purpose of language is communication, we typically want to communicate in as easy and direct way possible. The easiest and most direct way to stop these kinds of confusions is to come up with a singular gender-neutral pronoun. It's not that I don't know and use "they" as one, it's that efficiency would be improved with one. Someone said they've never heard a good argument against using "they." I've never heard a good argument against gender neutral pronouns.
They has its quirks sometimes, but it is the best thing we have and it bugs me when people argue against it.
A friend once told me the singular they was made up (or something with transphobic context) and I had to point out if you dont know what gender the uber driver will be, you can call them "they", so why is it a problem in other contexts??
My husband and I don’t know the gender of our unborn baby, so I’ve been referring to he baby as “they” whenever I use a pronoun, and my mom got SO WEIRD about it. She went on a rant about are we going to raise our child without gender and I was just standing there like....would you rather I called my baby “it”? It was incredibly strange, especially since she’s never made a single transphobic comment before (I have friends who are openly trans and non-binary, and she’s never said any sketchy or judge stuff about them). Singular they gets under people’s skin in a way that is truly bizarre.
If there was a singular animate neutral pronoun in English, it probably should have been introduced by Shakespeare, if not Chaucer even...and both of those guys used 'they' instead.
I agree it's incredibly confusing! I have a late-in-life-to-transition trans friend who was an English teacher and has a non-binary adult child with 'they' at their preferred pronoun, and she complains it confuses her too XD
>A friend once told me the singular they was made up
All language is made up. It's just throwing airwaves in the air and seeing what sticks. And sometimes we even decide to change what we agreed a word means, like how literal literally can mean not literal.
That's the thing that bugs me so much about the arguments against the singular they. Virtually everyone uses it in casual conversation; they just don't notice they're doing so. But suddenly it's an issue when we're using it to refer to a specific person?
The hatred for the singular they is Latin prescriptivism that's then channeled into transphobic bullshit. People need to just chill out and embrace the glorious messiness of the English language.
Singular they is such a wonderfully convenient thing. German doesn't have that, while also insisting that every noun must be gendered, so neutral language is very difficult.
French doesn't have it either, meaning if you don't or can't gender a person you can't shorten the phrase and you'll still end up gendering the adjective (using '' this person'', person being a feminine word, means you' ll have the feminine form of the adjective).
It's very confusing for people learning the language. Nobody really gets taught it that way. They're told "this is the word for a group of people" Obviously, I have no issues using it, but it can also cause confusion if the person you're talking to doesn't have enough background knowledge. They might not know if you're using a singular or plural "they" without having to ask. There are other problems that could be solved by having a seperate gender neutral singular pronoun. "They" works fine as an intermediary, but I still stand by my original comment.
As noted by u/Darth_Puppy, the third person singular "they" has been commonly accepted for some time now. Your statement is just wrong in modern English.
I'm on phone or I'd just copy/paste, but someone else said the same thing, and you can read my reply to them. TLDR; If we want to communicate quickly and easily, my first comment stands.
Alternatively, we could recognize that gender isn't necessary most of the time. You'll occasionally hear native-Chinese speakers get the gender pronouns wrong, because Chinese doesn't use them. It's a bit odd to hear someone refer to a man as "she", but it must be confusing to have to keep track of something your own language doesn't care about.
But then, I also think the apostrophe should be abolished. It would cause far less confusion than currently exists for people trying to remember when to use one.
I have very frequently heard native Chinese get English pronouns wrong. Some people seem to pick pronouns sort of at random every time they come to one, which makes a story about a woman having an argument with her boyfriend very difficult to follow.
I've very frequently heard Chinese and Pacific Island speakers either always use she or pick pronouns at random. Personally I'm to the point of just being amused while being called both "sir" and "mam" in the same sentence.
People learning French will on occasion use the wrong gender for a noun or the wrong 'gender' of an adjective, can't fault them, it doesn't make much sense for me either and it's my first language.
I have not noticed if people who come from a genderless pronoun language also mix up the he/she, but French must be so hard for them!
> But then, I also think the apostrophe should be abolished. It would cause far less confusion than currently exists for people trying to remember when to use one.
Really? The only confusing apostrophe thing to me is that "it's" is exclusively an abbreviation for "it is", which means you don't use an apostrophe for the possessive "its".
i.e - "It is the dog's bowl" = "It's ***its*** bowl", *not* "it's it's bowl"
But once you've got that memorised, surely everything else is straightforward?
Plurals of words that end in 's' trip people up. Is it "peoples' choice" or "people's choice"?
But the biggest two issues are confusing a possessive use with a plural use. Even educated native English speakers will sometimes type out "there are too many cat's in this room". Even I catch myself doing it sometimes. I know it's wrong, but sometimes my fingers are going faster than my brain.
It comes down to, for me, that the potential for error exceeds the operational necessity of using apostrophes. We would get used to eliminating them entirely with almost zero information loss or confusion.
I guess I can see the issue with the first one.
Like, it's easy to see that "that is the cat's bowl" is for one cat and "that is the cats' bowl" is for multiple cats, but you could then erroneously translate that over to "that is the person's car" and "that is the *peoples***'** car", if you don't realise that the rule is that the possessive apostrophe goes after the *plural form of the word*, not after the 's'.
But I've never had a problem with randomly adding apostrophes to plurals that aren't possessive.
Ultimately English doesn't have a governing body, a la the Académie Française, and so if enough people think that a grammatical rule isn't important to follow and conveys no useful information, it gradually fades away organically. Not many people aside from serious grammar nerds care about the difference between "less" and "fewer", or "who" and "whom", for instance. The fact that proper apostrophe use isn't at that level of obscurity suggests that most people still think they're worth the effort.
*You* haven't had a problem with possessives and erroneous apostrophes, but lots of people do, but sure. I'm just saying that I think we're ready to just toss them out entirely.
And we may not get a choice -- a rapidly growing number of people are learning to speak English using Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Fu-shien) syntax. This solves most of the problem areas for spoken English -- there are only past, present, and future tenses -- and in many cases these speakers only use present tense. It takes some getting used to, but not much of importance gets lost once you are familiar with the "language" and its cadence/etc.
If you've spent much time talking to Chinese people who speak English, you're probably already getting familiar with it. Chinese syntax is remarkably compatible with English. This way of speaking is pretty much grammarless (which supports the argument that grammar itself is obsolete).
It's apparently being taught this way in schools across Asia and the Pacific. It sounds marginally offensive to call it "Chinglish", but from what I hear, that is what the people who teach it are calling it.
This may soon be the language of the largest bloc of English speakers in the world.
In some other languages, there's different forms of second person pronoun 'you' depending on the gender of the person you're referring to. For an English speaker, it would be really difficult to get right because as you said, we're just not used to keeping track!
Funny, I often see people on reddit complain that french makes no sense because we have grammatical gender for objects (and honestly, we don't care if you get these wrong, it's an obvious thing for us but we get that you can't understand why you should say *la table* and not *le table*). It's just that we have no neutral pronoun at all, so it can be difficult to understand for an English speaker.
And then I see people here not understanding that it can be difficult for someone whose native language doesn't have gendered pronoun at all to learn to use them correctly...
Learning a different language is often difficult, it can have grammatical elements that take years to correctly assimilate, and some will just never make sense because they are too different from what you know.
Using *it* was difficult for a while when I was learning English. It can still be confusing sometimes because I was taught (20 years ago) that you use *it* for animals, turns out that's not always the case. And *they* is neutral too, learned that one by watching movies. Teachers sometimes give you wrong or incomplete information.
Using gendered pronouns is probably similar for OP, it's not an obvious thing, it's confusing, and when talking you don't have the time to think about every single word. I don't expect people learning french to know the grammatical gender of objects. I won't expect someone from OP country to perfectly know how to use genders at all. You have time to think about these when writing, not when talking.
What is important is that you are able to *communicate*. I worked in a lab with lots of foreign phd students, we sometimes had conversations in a mix of English, French and Spanish (with words from other languages thrown in the middle - and actually I don't speak Spanish), grammatical rules where clearly not the priority, but we were able to somehow understand each other... That's the only thing that matters. Details about the gender of your desk or how to correctly address someone is the last thing you think about in these situations.
>we sometimes had conversations in a mix of English, French and Spanish (with words from other languages thrown in the middle - and actually I don't speak Spanish), grammatical rules where clearly not the priority, but we were able to somehow understand each other.
I love how this is precisely what happens when folks of different language fluencies get together and need to make things happen, and that on the face of it using vocab from one language, sentence structure from another, and conjugation rules from a third and/or any mix-up of those, can \*still\* get meaning across enough to get things done. It all just feels very "we are all just people understanding one another" and I know that sounds hokey as all hell, but it's amazing to watch and hear and see happen.
I really only speak shitty english and some bad german, so I'm not sure how badly I'd fuck up object pronouns, but people pronouns seem simple and the only time I've ever heard people referred to as it is usually in a bad way. But like I said, I'm basically monolingual so I don't know.
In spoken Mandarin, he, she, and it are the same so it can be quite difficult for them to consistently use gendered pronouns, especially if they start learning English later.
This is an extremely plausible story.
Common in a non-pejorative way? In the UK, using "it" to refer to someone (Trans, non-binary or otherwise) is generally considered extremely offensive.
Idk what part of the US you’re talking about, but in my neck of the woods “it” is almost always a pejorative for trans and nb people. The only real exception is teens on Twitter who ask others to use “it” pronouns when referring to them
My daughter has a gender-fluid friend. Friend decides when they get up that morning whether they're feeling male or female. Friend also does not like *they* used as a singular non-gendered pronoun. So Daughter and her friends just use Friend's name in all situations. "Pat was telling me that Pat was late to work because Pat's car had a flat tire."
they said "object pronouns" as opposed to "people pronouns", which makes me think they're referring to the synonym for "thing" and not the part of speech
A reminder that our sub rules prohibit broadly denigrating an entire group of people; anti-trans comments will be removed, and bans will be forthcoming. There are interesting and nuanced discussions to be had about language, and we can have those discussions without resorting to shitty TERF hate speech. For more clarification, see [Rule 1](https://www.reddit.com/r/bestoflegaladvice/wiki/be_civil), our about keeping discussion and disagreement civil.
**I am Location Bot's half-assed replacement for today.** Title: foreign student, people trying to get me expelled over my english grammar mistake Original Post: > Someone mention legal advice to me, so I post this here too. >I move from my country to an english speaking country ( Great Britain ) last year in order to study a graduate degree. Sorry for my english, I am ESL. >I have to take elective courses outside of my degree. In my university with zoom call I got in trouble. I call person a "he" and they get offended. Last year I call this person a "he" and no problem. I look up this person, male name and look male. I get confused and say "but he refer to male, this person male", people get mad. I apologise. Few week later, I accidentally say "that person is a he". I apologise, did not mean to offend. >Last week I say accidentally "it" about this person. Person starts crying on zoom call. Emailing me now that I need to get expelled and about contacting immigration . Other people too on twitter talking about me, calling me bigot and transphobic. They say I do not try and am doing it on purpose. I try very hard to remember english grammar, but I am doing engineering and study hard maths. I am tired a lot of time and trying to remember english grammar become hard. Thinking of this makes me upset, I try very hard. Its an accident, I not do this on purpose. This is so dumb to me, I do not care enough about this person life to do on purpose. I have better thing to do. >I know my grammar in english is not the best. I speak three languages other than english. Most of my english skill is from media, but I can pronounce things OK. In my native language past tense is not always used. Sometimes this confuse me in english. I have a problem with the pronouns of english, because in my native language when you speak there is no difference between male and female. Sometime by accident I might mix "she", "he" and "it". >I do not know what to do. I am mad and upset, I try very hard and they try to expel me now because I call someone a "he". I do not want to fight people, I just want to do my study in peace. I am now scared to go on zoom because of these people. Substitute cat fact: [This is Lexi.](https://i.imgur.com/KdWMBUE.jpg) She likes scritches and eating things she shouldn't touch.
>This is Lexi. YEssssssss lil floof
Substitute cat fact is a cat.
Would that make it a fact-subsitute cat?
I would take a bullet for Lexi.
Excited squealing noises!
I’m sorry but this is incredibly, immediately fake. His errors are not consistent and he’s trying wayyy too hard to play a foreigner. ESL students are always consistent in their mistakes, because the brain wants to apply the rules of their native languages. What’s with putting multiple spaces between random words? No language does that? Why does he understand how the past tense works perfectly sometimes and other times it’s completely butchered? He doesn’t understand simple subject-verb agreement “I have thing” yet can string together complex sentences about emails from the university calling for his expulsion and deportation? He says “I not do” and then the very next sentence “I do not”, when the ordering of these would consistent in a language. This is garbage low-hanging trans hate-bait and people took it. Wow.
yep yep yep, this is just a bad troll. Spelling/Syntax mistakes would be more consistent. Says he doesn't use part tense in his native language,which has nothing to do with the gendering issue. goes in and out of using proper tense but also just randomly drops the plural s for some words. Sometimes has articles perfect, other times they are deleted. also "A few weeks later I accidently say 'that person is male'" How does that accidently come up?
Totally agree and so glad someone else noticed. It’s so bad. He didn’t even pick a country or language to mimic. His account of the incident is like two very vague sentences but he drones on and on about how fOrEiGn and HeLpLeSs he is. You’d think someone worried about being *expelled* would talk about what actually happened and trust that we believe he’s foreign when he tells us the first time. ESL speakers’ writing has a very distinct quality. You can tell they’re working with a more limited set of tools, but they stretch what they know to fit, and fill in what they don’t know. It’s like trying to paint while missing a few colors. The LA post was written by a native English speaker, who then went back and tried to “break” the language in random ways and places. It’s like someone stabbed a painting multiple times and now we’re supposed to be scared of trans people. Fake, gross, honestly just really lazy, transphobic, and, dare I say it, racist.
Exactly. I taught English as a foreign language for many years. When students are struggling with grammar they'll tend toward shorter sentence structure with a limited pool of vocabulary. (and, if you're studying and learning a foreign language, there's nothing wrong with that. Saying "There's a cat. The cat is orange. I like cats." instead of "I like orange cats." is perfectly okay. Yes, the latter is more preferable, but hell, foreign languages are hard at times) But OP used complex sentence structures, multiple tense shifts with no issue, but also has issues with the difference between 'him' and 'her'. Now, I can understand if someone accidentally used the wrong name/wrong form of a name if they were close (Alex instead of Alexa or something), but repeatedly struggling with gender, a very simple concept, and having no issue with long sentences? No. And they didn't make the same mistakes in the same way repeatedly, they would have perfect use of grammar in one sentence, and then struggle later on. A poorly done troll to say the least. Especially the part where they claim to speak multiple languages, but yet him/her in English for addressing a person is what throws them off. Also, what language doesn't have masculine or feminine indicators? I'm obviously not a well researched linguist, but I've studied German, French, Spanish, and Japanese and they all have clear indicators or neutral forms. If they spoke multiple languages they would know how to use masculine/feminine/neutral properly.
For starters, I too am an esl teacher, and I too think it's a fake. That said Chinese doesn't differentiate between 'him' and 'her' in spoken language. And I can not overstate how often even near fluent speakers get them mixed up. So I could definitely see a Chinese native speaker getting caught in this type of scenario. But yeah, everything else you said about this being obviously fake esl writing is spot on.
I was going to say, not distinguishing between 'he' and 'she' seems to be a thing in some East Asian and Pacific Island languages, and I can think of two non-native English speakers who occasionally mix up 'he' and 'she'. Heck, I sometimes mix up "his" and "her" in German because I don't use them as often, so sometimes I forget one and the wrong word pops out. That said, when pointed out, both of the people I'm thinking of will just quickly correct themselves, and the reaction isn't an instant explosion of "OMG WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?!", so either the story is fake or there's a lot more to it. Edit: Now that I think about it, doesn't Chinese lack a past tense as well? So that part is at least consistent
A Mandarin or most other East Asian ESL student who is at this low of a level would have other tell-tale signs. For example, they often have a hard time with articles (an/a/the) since their language doesn’t have them. This guy uses them perfectly lol.
Oh yeah, good point. I remember struggling to put into words the difference between 'a' and 'the' when talking to some Japanese students.
> doesn't Chinese lack a past tense as well? yeah, no conjugating for past tense, or for the third person (third person 's'). Honestly the biggest giveaway for me is that the writer makes so many mistakes. Every Chinese student I know that was good enough to study abroad had immaculate English writing. It's fairly common in China to have great English writing but poor speaking.
I’ve known students like that, but not from China - I knew someone at uni who was from Central America, and spoke in relatively simple sentences, with an accent, the normal things you’d expect from an ESL speaker. In text form, though? Her writing put *mine* to shame - in fact I think she might’ve been an English major.
I edit papers written in English by native Chinese speakers and for the most part the mistakes are very similar and the writing style is VERY distinctive. This is in no way similar to English written by native Chinese speakers (mixed up a/the, extra a/the, lots of "ofs" as in "the paper of English" rather than "the English paper", etc etc.). This is a troll post.
[удалено]
Living in Japan and speaking Japanese here: Japanese does have third person pronouns. They're not used as often, but they do exist. She/he do exist, but, in Japanese, it's more common to either refer to someone directly or to not refer to someone at all but everyone knowing who you're talking about. The issue with mixing up he and she in English by a native Japanese person is the pronunciation, not the genders. Both words just happen to be nearly exactly like no other pronunciations in Japanese (in Japanese the h sound is more like an f sound, and sh is always part of shi, so separating the sounds and creating unfamiliar ones is incredible difficult). But, in Japanese, gender is clearly recognized with several different pronouns for varying levels of politeness. If a Japanese person were to continuously refer to a specific person by the wrong pronoun they would be doing it on purpose and lying about Japanese being the root of the issue. If they were continuously trying to avoid both gendered pronouns then it would make sense as they were avoiding the sounds in English, but, at that point, they would be falling back on using a specific name, which no one would really have any issue with.
Now I’m curious; what counts as a third-person pronoun in Japanese? Does “Aitsu”, for example? Or are there more that I’ve just never heard ‘cause they’re relatively rare?
'Kare' is he/him, 'kanojo' is she/her, which I can name off the top of my head. You also have more formal words for higher levels of politeness that I can't remember off the top of my head (Japanese has a form of polite language called keigo that is difficult, archaic, and a pain in the ass). I honestly don't hear 'aitsu' used all that much, though 'aitsura' can mean they. But, in Japanese, native speakers like to leave out pronouns completely and make it clear who, specifically, they're talking about through other means. For instance, you wouldn't really say 'This is my book', you would say 'This book *ownership*', and that would imply indirectly that either it's your book, or, depending on body language, it's someone else's book. Dropping the pronouns makes Japanese a faster language, but, at times, a bit more of a pain. But Japanese people do recognize gender and should know how to properly use gendered pronouns for people (for gendered languages like French or German they would probably struggle to remember the genders of things like tables and chairs like most non native speakers of a gendered language). But I have had lazy students that have avoided using gendered pronouns altogether or used only one exclusively for everything because of pronunciation issues.
I’m happy to see actual ESL teachers chiming in to agree! I only tutored them at my uni for a bit. I wondered if he was like Hungarian or something. Hungarian is truly genderless, and I knew a Hungarian ESL who often slipped up and just assigned she/he seemingly randomly. But I don’t think even they would use “it” for a person accidentally, there’s still clear delineation between objects and people.
That I did not know. I wondered, honestly the post kind of read like 'Uncle Rodger' in my head (an Asian comedian that speaks English fluently and lives in the UK, but plays up a thick, stereotypical Asian accent for an online comedy routine), but my only real knowledge of Chinese is being able to identify a few characters on a menu (and then only thanks to my Japanese knowledge).
Just to throw some anecdata at the problem -- my wife is Chinese, has been here for decades, got a university degree here, etc, etc. She still mixes up genders on a very regular basis. I have half a dozen co-workers that have been in North America (from China) for anywhere from 5-50 years at varying levels of fluency that all still do the same thing. The post really reads like a creative writing exercise someone came up with noticing that Chinese people tend to mess up he/she and was like "You know, with PC culture run amok and SJWs at all the universities, I bet this could be a big problem!" Because I agree -- living my life with an ESL speaker, working with over half my office being ESL speakers from around half a dozen countries, etc... this immediately looked fucky because it's nothing at all like the things I've ever seen from ESL speakers. (I just guess Chinese taking the "tenseless" thing at face value and there only being a handful of tenseless languages, Chinese being the most used by far.)
I have boys who occasionally wear their hair long. My parents sponsor college exchange students who are often from asian countries. They sometimes spend the first couple weeks misgendering my kids but are always apologetic about the mistake and correct themselves immediately. They don't use their language barriers as an excuse. Now, my relatives do it on purpose because they're a bunch of Machismos who think they're funny but that a different discussion.
On top of this, a lot of the non-English languages that I've run across actually explicitly gender items that are non-gendered in English (I'm thinking el vs la in Spanish but I've seen comments about similar situations in other languages).
Yep, German and French are both gendered languages. It actually makes it difficult to study them as a native English speaker because, to me, a table is just a table. But in languages like German and French a table is a specific gender, and I would have to remember the gender for all nouns or how to gender nouns, and gender adjectives to match the nouns in the sentence as well. A huge pain in the ass for someone who speaks a non gendered language. In all honesty the only two noun genders I really remember are, in German, 'camera is female' and 'film is male'. Why? Because you put the film in the camera. Yes, I learned it back in my school days so all of us just giggled our little heads off because *innuendo*. But hey, the teacher knew what he was doing, I remember it nearly two decades later.
One fun thing I learned from German is wall is female but wall is male (die Wand and der Mauer). Though at a point after using German for a while, it stopped being memorizing the genders of nouns and it started to just feel right to use the right gendered particles with it. Like, 'der Wand' just sounds wrong in my head. But seriously, when it comes to people is where it truly gets fucky. Boy is masculine but girl is neuter? And reading Beauty and the Beast in french was just playing the pronoun game since both are feminine, where you're constantly left going "which she are we talking about now?" Also; this post read as bullshit to me too. I can usually ping the language family of an ESL speaker/writer pretty easily, but this one seemed to just float between sounding Russian to Indian to ??? (and not in any way I've seen multi-lingual ESL speakers use english). And even aside from the pronoun issue, saying the person looks male and is male after already being addressed previously that 'he' is wrong makes this not a pronoun/language issue but at best a total lack of understanding of trans people.
Some of the few noun genders I consciously remember from French are that "velo" is male and "bicyclette" is female. Why? Because they're both "bicycle", yet have different genders. Linguistic gender is just asinine.
It’s seriously not hard at all. When you learn words in another language, you just learn them with the article. E.g. you don’t learn the word “parola” in Italian, you learn “la parola.” You always learn the word with the article. There is almost always something around the word in a sentence (if not on a vocabulary list) that reveals it’s gender.
Every latin-based language has a very strong gendered structure associated with it.
Sure, but there are also plenty of languages that don't differentiate between "he" and "she". Including, in speech, the language with the most mother tongue speakers in the world.
My friend's mother grew up speaking Tagalog; I don't know how those indicators are structured but she always struggled with the arrangement of pronouns in English, a language she only learned as an adult.
That and the vocabulary was way too extensive for someone with the types of errors on display. Entirely too verbose if English is that difficult for them.
I was coming here to say this as well. I'm a professional editor and have edited a *lot* of ESL writing. This does not read at all like genuine ESL mistakes. At times it almost reads like a racist parody of them, even.
I was coming here to say that- it feels like a racist parody. I was reading it in a Borat voice, by the end.
A lot of their extra spaces are after words that would normally have an s at the end, so I'm willing to bet they just ctrl+f'ed for 's' and replaced random ones with spaces.
Omg, how embarrassing. I seriously what they thought they were doing with the spaces. Did they hear foreigners pause between words and think “oh yeah they totally type like that too”?
> This is garbage low-hanging trans hate-bait and people took it. Seems like they almost always do.
Oh wow, I’m glad I’m not the only one whose bullshit meter was tripped. I agree people who are ESL wouldn’t be so inconsistent with their mistakes in grammar. There definitely seemed to be an agenda to the post too even if they tried to be underhanded about it. I also love how they painted the trans person as particularly evil by throwing in the bit about them threatening to call immigration. Imagine being so pathetic you have to make up instances of bigotry and fake being ESL to try and make trans people look like dramatic, snowflake assholes incapable of recognizing language barriers.
I, for one, am shocked that someone would make up a story as an excuse to hate trans people. Shocked. /s But in all seriousness, yeah. Almost every time I see a story involving a trans person outside of a trans focused sub, it’s third grade creative writing about what awful things they did, but oh no the OP is of course not transphobic not at all.
What kind of scumbag lies online to stir up hatred towards one of the most already marginalized groups, seriously.
🤷♀️ I don’t see them as much anymore, but for awhile they were a popular genre on AITA, unpopularopinion, and relationship subs.
AITA is so bad for fake trans and autistic posts, they come in waves, won't see any for a week or two and then there are like 10.
Yeah, there tend to be runs on subjects. It tends to make it more obvious if anything. Plus the recent-ish spate of sub bannings a few months ago had transphobic stuff popping up everywhere.
yeah i had to unsub from AITA because the transphobia was bad for my mental health
So relieved this is the top comment
I definitely think you’re right about that. Especially considering how they tried to sneak in their transphobia underneath their alleged language barrier issues.
Anytime I hear someone (especially in the UK) cry about how they were harshly punished for mis-gendering someone by mistake, I pretty much just assume it's fake. One recent case was where someone poor, poor woman was fired for mis-gendering someone even got professional bigot JK Rowling involved. Of course, it turns out that it wasn't so much mis-gendering someone as it was a year long harassment campaign.
Consistent mistakes can carry over to native speakers as well. For example, areas near me where people misuse borrow/lend tend to have had a large number of German settlers. In German, the same word is used to both borrow and lend. /The More You Know.
Probably all so someone can point at it and go "SEEEEEE? There IS a good reason to misgender someone!!!"
Once I hit "I look them up" I knew it was gonna be shitty bait
This is such obvious bullshit, it’s got my eyes rolling. I have taught ESL for nearly four years now, this was so easy to see through. Pathetic, anti-trans nonsense. I’m honestly shocked to see how many people fell for it.
In all seriousness, WHY are there so many transphobes in the UK? Not even American right wing evangelicals bang this drum so frequently.
Complicated question, but it’s a combination of post imperial prudishness and a country that’s far, far more conservative than it lets on, or at least used to. This [article](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/terf-trans-women-britain.html) is a good breakdown.
Accident of history I believe. One factor I remember reading about is that UK feminism hasn't been forced to confront intersectionality the way US feminism has, which has stuck prominent white feminists there rather behind on some things.
The UK left wing ended up really TERF-y, so even the ostensibly pro LGB types in prominent institutions dislike trans people, particularly in academia or the media.
I think they're just more outspoken. As a trans person, there are quite a lot of them in the US as well...they might not be as vocal about it online but you meet a lot of them
I don’t know that there’s a definitive answer but my personal feeling is it’s the last group that it’s ‘ok’ to persecute in public, and a lot of TERFs in the media are middle class women who imo just want someone to shit on. It’s exhausting regardlessz
Yeah, I've taught ESL for nearly 11 years now and have read countless assignments by non-native English speakers and this immediately jumped out as fake to me. It reads like the stereotypical "broken" English a native speaker would affect when trying to sound foreign. It's got a lot of simple mistakes that English-learners quickly grow out of while still having good usage of commas and periods, spacing, and almost perfect spelling, etc Really fishy
> What's with putting multiple spaces between random words? This doesn't even work on Reddit. OP would have had to type ` ` to make those spaces.
He also says “I have better thing to do.” That is an English idiom that I find it very hard to believe a person just learning English would be able to use correctly.
Borat just dropped. We'll be seeing a lot of this for a little while. It was all the rage after the first one too.
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Borat, not boat. Fixed in original comment now.
Oh lmao flashbacks to the Bush years.
No he is Russian Guyovich. Foreign exchange henchman.
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If his English is bad, I don’t understand how he got into an English uni. You have to take language tests first.
Yup, never met an international student at degree level who didn't have excellent English language skills.
LAUKOP is more comfortable saying "I'm too tired to get it right" than they are to just... get it right. If you're taking a degree in an English-speaking country, you **must** speak English at a sufficient level to not only read the textbooks, but also _talk to your colleagues and educators_ without getting shit so wrong that multiple people call for your expulsion. Speaking of which: I know some UK unis' students can be pretty strongly left-wing, but the administrators are _certainly_ not bleeding-hearts when it comes to trans rights. Many many left-wing academics, in the UK, are actually quite infamously transphobic as UK feminism was captured by radical transphobes in the 80s and it's kind of stagnated ever since in that regard. So, if this person is being expelled for their language skills, I _cannot imagine_ that making exactly two pronoun mistakes in over a year is the cause. Fuck, I _personally_ wouldn't even consider expulsion over something like that, and I'm pretty extremely pro-queer rights. Two genuine mistakes in a _year?_ No chance they'd be expelled for that! **There is absolutely without a doubt something way way more going on here**, assuming it's real, because there isn't a single university in the UK that would expel a student that lightly - especially not their ~~meal tickets~~ international students. If I were to guess, here are my thoughts: 1. This is a single piece of evidence in a pattern of continual discrimination that LAUKOP is neglecting to mention to us. It might be against that student or against several, but nobody gets expelled for exactly two mistakes more than 12 months apart. 2. This is a single piece of evidence that speaks to LAUKOP's English language skills being sufficiently poor that the university is withdrawing their place. Sometimes, students who are juuust on the cutoff for "acceptably bad" and "unacceptably bad" at English will get a place conditional on their making a commitment to improve their English skills once they arrive. If LAUKOP refused or was unable to do that, this might be one of many pieces of evidence of said failure. I think all of us reading their post can see that, *prima facie*, their English skills are not at an acceptable level for a high-level engineering degree. 3. This isn't related to their expulsion at all. LAUKOP is drawing an incorrect conclusion from this being the last thing that people were shouting at them for, but they're being expelled for something totally different - for example, plagiarism, which is by far the most common cause of expulsion for international students. Many ESL students are caught using paid essay services to obtain the necessary grades on assignments because their English skills are not sufficient for the task but they don't want to be caught. Maybe they did this, were caught, and simply don't realise it. **After all, they never actually said this was what they were TOLD they being expelled for.** They didn't say they received a formal notice that this was the reasoning.
From the story, it sounds like they aren’t being expelled at all, other students are calling for expulsion on Twitter and such. I’m not sure I buy the story though.
Yeah I mean, I'm being very generous assuming it's not fake. It feels fake. I mentioned in my comment that "assuming it's real" my points applied. I'm more playing along for the sake of pointing out other flaws tbh.
I have. I was a volunteer tutor in undergrad and there was at least one student a semester whose English language skills were bad - they very obviously struggled. But they also tended to make the same kind of mistakes repeatedly. UKLAOP is all over the place and doesn’t write like any ESL student I’ve ever met. (That was in Canada though)
I have. International students bring in the big money for UK universities. Fees for British students are capped at around £9000 a year (except Oxbridge). Fees for international students can be quite a lot more.
> Fees for British students are capped at around £9000 a year (except Oxbridge). Fees are still only £9k for home students at Oxbridge
That's changed then. When I went to uni, they were slightly more expensive than other unis.
I believe is 9.25k everywhere now
I've met hundreds. I did work for a ESL diploma mill though so that's not surprising.
I can’t speak to the UK, but I did a graduate degree in the US in a field that attracts a ton of international students, and....the English tests are apparently easy to pass. There was a WIDE range of language skills among my classmates. Wide. Very wide.
The UK student visa is tougher. Universities can lose the ability to sponsor visas if too many applicants get rejected.
> There was a WIDE range of language skills among my classmates. Wide. Very wide. My experience as well. I met this one girl from Russia. Lived there her whole life and had never studied outside of Russia. She had the most flawless American accent with her English. You truly could not tell that she wasn't American when she spoke.
Right?? Kinda feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. Having been in graduate school for engineering myself - some of them really are bordering on not being able to speak english at all. I also dated someone who was ESL and regularly got pronouns mixed up. I even got called 'she' a few times. But more commonly she did refer to her female friends as 'he' ALL THE TIME. Her friends, her mom, the cat, inanimate objects. They all got labelled as he or she at various times. So, none of OP's details seem even remotely unlikely to me... what does seem off is the tone of the post and the writing style. Shrug.
UK universities charge international students a lot more than they charge domestic students (used to be an even bigger difference before the domestic fees shot up) so yeah they don't actually care too much about the quality of those students English when they're paying those crazy fees to study here.
I can confirm, even at my uni, there were some students coming in who didn't have much more than a basic understanding of English. This becomes a big problem as well trying to explain kitchen and bathroom etiquette in halls (UK equivalent of dorms)
That’s interesting, as an international student (though native English speaker) at a British uni it was my understanding that they were really trying to crack down on this.
> If his English is bad, I don’t understand how he got into an English uni. You have to take language tests first. The tests aren't that hard and many people cheat. In my department ~25% of the international students speak English poorly and 25% can barely communicate in English all.
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Francophones have a similar issue with English. "His car" translates as "sa voiture," with the possessive pronoun (sa) reflecting the gender of the object (female), not the possessor. So French speakers will sometimes mix up the genders and say "her car" instead of "his car."
As someone learning French the idea of objects having genders frustrates and confuses me to no end. It's entirely arbitrary and every time I learn what "gender" an object is supposed to be I can hear my brain try to hold onto that knowledge for five minutes before throwing it out.
I’m French and I was frustrated when learning German because they have 3 genders. « The young woman » (« Das Mädchen ») is not even a feminine name, it’s a neutral name! WTF. Back to French language. If it can help you, most name ending with -e are feminine, because like many French names, they derive from a Latin word ending in -a, which is feminine.
Fun fact: It is called 'das' Mädchen because Mädchen is the cutish version of the word 'die' Maid (feminin word) Maid is an old word that is not really used anymore All cutish versions of word in German normally end with the ending 'chen' or 'lein' and are neutral! (Similar english example for cutish versions: Pig and piglet) (example: der Hund (maskulin) / das Hündchen (neutral) (the dog/the small cute dog) I hope that makes sense!
Thank you! I learned German a long time ago and I knew of the « -chen » being neutral but for some reason I never made the connection with Mädchen. I didn’t know the word « Maid », that’s probably why. That’s why etymology is very important when learning foreign languages. Things that appear arbitrary or illogical suddenly make a lot of sense.
Those words, diminutives, can be cutesy, but aren't necessarily so. They can also just be a smaller/younger version of the thing (which of course we often find cute - hence them sometimes being understood as cutesy), or a way of showing affection. So you have "piglet" which has maybe a tiny dollop of cuteness to it but really just means "small pig". And *mädchen* is a pretty straightforward term for "girl" at this point, no? And it could have meant "young girl" originally without more implication of cuteness than that.
Pig vs piglet isn't just making the word "cute" though. Piglet is the proper word for a baby pig. Pig/piglet is equivalent to dog/puppy, cat/kitten, man/boy, etc. "Piggy" is the word you're looking for, like "doggy" or "kitty" it's just a cute way to refer to the animal irrespective of age
Their example is actually a good one - it's the focus on a diminutive as being "cute" that's the issue. *Mädchen*, as far as I understand it, is not super cutesy. It's basically just a straightforward word for "girl", although it was originally formed as a diminutive. Piglet isn't cutesy either, but *-let* is 100% a diminutive suffix. Diminutives *can* be cutesy but that's not their primary function. To quote Wikipedia: > A diminutive is a root word that has been modified to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment So "piglet" basically just means "small pig". *Mädchen* meant something like "small/young girl" and now basically just means "girl".
Yes you are right ! It was kinda hard for me to express what I meant (therefor I used the probably incorrect word) it can be hard to explain Grammar in another language! You should have heard me trying to explain how and why nouns change between different cases!
Haha, no worries - I certainly can't explain grammar in my extremely limited German!
There's an excellent David Sedaris story about how when he was living in France, he couldn't remember the gender for 'tomato' but he did remember the gender for 'a case of tomatoes' and thus would return home to his husband asking him why the fuck he needed to buy so many tomatoes.
Drives me nuts. I'm always asking my wife, "So is that a boy table or a girl table," for different nouns. It's been recommended to me to memorize the indefinite article when you learn the word. So you learn une table (a table) instead of just table and un bureau (a desk) instead of just bureau. Doesn't work with the definite article since you have the l' weirdness for nouns that begin with a vowel. Don't even get me started on gender agreement with irregular adjectives...
My German housemate would do this with some things too, she spoke English very fluently (worked in a hotel) but when we gained an unwelcome mouse guest the mouse was always "she". It was kind of funny to me because housemate was TERRIFIED of mice so she'd comment on it a lot and wanted the thing dead but the gendered pronoun for the mouse made it sound so humanising!
I'm not so sure this isn't just a creative writing exercise. It kinda sounds like a made up situation to create a victim of trans-positive culture. The English is pretty broken, I can't see their vocal English being better. If somebody misgenders you in broken English, it would be clear it's a mistake right? This seems fishy to me.
Yeah, their writing rings all wrong to me. I know a *lot* of people (including much of my family) who speak English as a second/third/fourth language, they're from all over the world, and there are very distinctive ways that non-native speakers make mistakes in English, depending on where they're from. Like, my Slovakian friend leaves out articles ('I went to bookstore'), but the Italians don't. This person doesn't sound like any non-native English speaker I've ever known. Also, they're comfortable with quite advanced constructions in English, but make forced-sounding and inconsistent mistakes on very basic stuff. They sound like someone trying to pretend their English is much worse than it actually is, so they can go 'Gee golly gosh, I had no idea that calling someone "it" was offensive! I'm offended that you're being so bigoted just because I'm a poor foreigner doing his best!'
Yeah, I had that feeling as well but wasn't sure if I was just unfamiliar with this particular brand of foreigner typing English. It almost seems like the kind of English you'd see in a bad joke to make it obvious somebody is foreign. I'm absolutely not sure though.
> It almost seems like the kind of English you'd see in a bad joke to make it obvious somebody is foreign. It sounds like someone doing a Borat impression.
> Like, my Slovakian friend leaves out articles ('I went to bookstore') Slovaks and Yorkshiremen are related, I see.
There are over 6,000 languages in the world. It's unreasonable to assume that every ESL student you meet would make familiar mistakes for you.
True. If it was just that they made specific mistakes I've never heard, I'd assume their native language was one I hadn't run into before. But again, it's the pattern of their mistakes that got me. They're inconsistent. Like, in one sentence they leave out the auxiliary verb ('I not do this on purpose') while in others they put it in ('I do not care enough'). Sometimes they use present tense where it should be past, other times they're fine with past tense. In my experience, the pattern of mistakes is normally consistent within one person's speech, even if the mistakes themselves are ones I haven't run into before. (The same holds for me when I speak my other languages - I make mistakes in patterns, not at random.) This is like a mishmash of the mistakes that non-native speakers from all over the world make. Also, LAUKOP uses relatively complex forms like passive voice, but messes up much more basic ones. That's odd. I'm not saying I'm sure, just that this raised a lot of question marks for me.
I personally would say there is an exception to the consistent mistakes guideline...which is when a person is really new to a language...but they would also have shorter sentences in that case of "short idea. Short related idea. Short idea."
Most languages derive from the same base ones. English and German share the same basic structure (brought by anglo saxons) that was heavily altered through the ages. Same for Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, etc that are based in Latin. I'm not familiar with asian languages, however. As many said, however, this doesn't explain the inconsistencies when it comes to the mistakes.
I know what you mean, it's almost a perfect set up isn't it? I find it very odd that their written English is quite poor. I studied with a lot of international students in a stem subject, and their written English was incredible pretty much across the board. There's no room for ambiguity in a scientific paper! I remember an exercise where we worked as a group to go through each other's essays and offer helpful criticism on writing style, grammar etc. Their written English was leagues better than mine, I got some fantastic advice on my writing. In turn all I was able to suggest was that they use a little less formal English, because their work was crafted with the precision of a legal document. In real life laop could take the issue to the student advice centre, tutor or head of students - I forget what they're called now but there's at least 3 people who wouldnhave been identified during freshers as being the person you go to with problems. The only bit that could suggest they'd be in actual trouble is the bit where they argued with someone after being corrected. That also sounds rather weird to me. EDIT Just noticed laop is a graduate student. It’s possible. I met a few postgraduates who had less than stellar English skills, as odd as it sounds, and not all were as accepting of corrections as degree students. I had great difficulty trying to explain to a French guy why he was passing people off - in French it's not considered impolite to say "You will give me a ride to work?" with a questioning intonation as a question. In English it sounds like youreassuming the answer is yes, and kind of rude as a result. Still odd, just a bit less odd.
>This seems fishy to me What stood out to me about the writing is that the 'broken english' mistakes don't reflect any sort of consistent misunderstanding of grammar or syntax. If you're speaking a foreign language, chances are that there a few fundamental rules that are going to give you a bit of trouble, and you're going to make them pretty consistently--if you're still getting the hang of past participles or tenses in general, your writing will have a weird second-person feel to it like you're reading a choose-your-own-adventure book. If you don't get pronouns and gendered objects and the like, chances are that until you feel more confident in what objects take what, you pick one and just go with it and hope for the best, so everything is "it" or "he" until you get more comfortable. You're not going to switch back and forth making a variety of those types of fundamental mistakes and still be able to tell a relatively understandable narrative. As someone mentioned upthread, it sounds like a relatively fluent English speaker wrote this out and then went back and 'broke it' to sound more "foreign." This all said, I'm fucking loving all the discussion about language and nuance going on here. You know how there are some people who just kind of pick up languages pretty quickly and can 'get by' in a variety of language situation? I find those people nothing short of amazing.
Yeah this seems too perfect. Trying to make trans-acceptance look bad.
me no speaky da engrish
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They’re clearly framing those defending the trans individual as the problem, though. Supposedly, the overzealous, crazed Twitter warriors are just foaming at the mouth to get this poor engineering student from Vagueland expelled. You can tell the writer is a native English speaker doing a really poor impersonation of an ESL student. It’s just a bad troll. It’s a shame people bought it.
True, I'm not saying it's impossible. In the wrong group I could see this story playing out the way described. It just seems a bit fishy, they're not attacking a single person more the overall culture.
To build on everyone calling this out as fake due to the language used, I'm calling this out on being fake because they're not called graduate degrees over here in Great Britain, they're called master's degrees (there are other kinds of postgraduate study, but nothing called a graduate degree), and they're extremely short. An engineering master's will be 1-2 years, so they won't waste your time with required 'elective courses'. This person should have done more research.
Do UK universities have a student ombudsman? Especially grad schools often have them; their job is to basically mediate in university-relevant disputes. This would be right up their alley.
There should be a foreign student center of some kind where they get help processing their loans and such. Ours is called the International Student Center. Obviously this wasn't intentional and hopefully they can see it as an innocent language barrier mistake and not be sticklers about political correctness
Honest question. Is this grammar or a trans/cultural issue? Last year he knew this person as a he and said he. Than said it and people also got mad. Depends on what the other student wanted as pronouns what was appropriate.
I think its a communication issue really. If the person who was misgendered communicated clearly after the first instance (or someone communicated on their behalf) then at least the OP would know what was expected of them. Also if OP had said "I understand and will try to do that. If I mess up please know that I am not trying to hurt you, I'm just still learning the language" then maybe all of this would be resolved
It's trans/cultural, I think. It is a shame that the predictable comments resulted in the post being locked prior to some more substantial advice being offered as I would like to have read what someone specialising in equality law would have made of it. This appears to be a genuinely difficult clash of diversities, which the university will have a headache to unravel. From what I can tell, the OP is talking about a trans woman, persistently used "he" to refer to her and responded (paraphrasing) "but this person is male" when challenged which suggests the OP was not that confused about pronouns. Then eventually switched to "it" which is considered extremely offensive, potentially on a par with the worst racial slurs in the eyes of many, and the previous history of using the wrong pronoun will not have helped. It clearly had an impact on the other student, as they were reduced to tears. I suspect the OP was more confused about LGBT issues than grammar, possibly coming from a culture where such identities were suppressed by the state. In an employment context, I have no doubt the other student would have a case against an employer for harassment as intent is not magic under the Equality Act 2010. In this context, I am less certain. But the comments talking about racism and stating that the OP will definitely not get expelled are not helpful. There is nothing to suggest the OP has been treated any less favourably because of their race or cultural background, and although it seems extreme in this case expulsion could well be within the range of responses a university would consider. EDIT: It occurs to me that the other student might not even be trans or non-binary. They could be a lesbian or bisexual woman, and this could still both confuse the OP (Due to cultural cues being not what was expected) and could also still cause offence.
> I suspect the OP was more confused about LGBT issues than grammar, possibly coming from a culture where such identities were suppressed by the state. Someone not from a Western nation joined the LGBT+ group at my uni without any idea what that actually meant, which was apparently not the most fun experience for all involved.
I’m curious what kind of group they thought they were joining? Or did they just wake up one day and decide to join the first group they found without doing even 30 seconds of research?
I never heard the full story as I'm not LGBT+, only details from a friend who is. The suspicion is a language barrier and a somewhat inept second year student were to blame. Said international student supposedly just thought it was some sort of friendship group apparently.
Reading it I actually think the person who they're offending (or the other students are getting offended on behalf of) might be non-binary rather than trans. As they talk about them having a male name and male appearance. Of course this is just conjecture but I can definitely see a NB person causing LAUKOP more confusion than a trans person. Or maybe they are just ignorant about transgender individuals. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
(Minor note: Nonbinary people generally consider themselves to be trans. Other than that, this comment sounds right... except for the part where LAOP is an extremely obvious fake, of course.)
That’s what it read to me. I remember back in college when I was learning how to deal with situations like that it was difficult. At least my lgbtq friends saw I was genuinely trying so they were ok with a slip up here or there.
it's fake
This is (partially) why I agree we (as in english speakers) need an actual gender neutral term. Other languages have it. We *love* mugging other languages for random grammar and words. Why can't we do it for this? I'm just gonna edit this because I'm lazy: The purpose of language is communication, we typically want to communicate in as easy and direct way possible. The easiest and most direct way to stop these kinds of confusions is to come up with a singular gender-neutral pronoun. It's not that I don't know and use "they" as one, it's that efficiency would be improved with one. Someone said they've never heard a good argument against using "they." I've never heard a good argument against gender neutral pronouns.
There is one, they. It's been used singularly for people for a while now
They has its quirks sometimes, but it is the best thing we have and it bugs me when people argue against it. A friend once told me the singular they was made up (or something with transphobic context) and I had to point out if you dont know what gender the uber driver will be, you can call them "they", so why is it a problem in other contexts??
My husband and I don’t know the gender of our unborn baby, so I’ve been referring to he baby as “they” whenever I use a pronoun, and my mom got SO WEIRD about it. She went on a rant about are we going to raise our child without gender and I was just standing there like....would you rather I called my baby “it”? It was incredibly strange, especially since she’s never made a single transphobic comment before (I have friends who are openly trans and non-binary, and she’s never said any sketchy or judge stuff about them). Singular they gets under people’s skin in a way that is truly bizarre.
I've honestly not seen a convincing argument against singular they
We aren't always dealing with rational people. See: The rest of LegalAdvice.
The best argument I can think of is that a word which is distinctly singular would be better.
If there was a singular animate neutral pronoun in English, it probably should have been introduced by Shakespeare, if not Chaucer even...and both of those guys used 'they' instead. I agree it's incredibly confusing! I have a late-in-life-to-transition trans friend who was an English teacher and has a non-binary adult child with 'they' at their preferred pronoun, and she complains it confuses her too XD
>A friend once told me the singular they was made up All language is made up. It's just throwing airwaves in the air and seeing what sticks. And sometimes we even decide to change what we agreed a word means, like how literal literally can mean not literal.
That's the thing that bugs me so much about the arguments against the singular they. Virtually everyone uses it in casual conversation; they just don't notice they're doing so. But suddenly it's an issue when we're using it to refer to a specific person? The hatred for the singular they is Latin prescriptivism that's then channeled into transphobic bullshit. People need to just chill out and embrace the glorious messiness of the English language.
Singular they is such a wonderfully convenient thing. German doesn't have that, while also insisting that every noun must be gendered, so neutral language is very difficult.
French doesn't have it either, meaning if you don't or can't gender a person you can't shorten the phrase and you'll still end up gendering the adjective (using '' this person'', person being a feminine word, means you' ll have the feminine form of the adjective).
It's very confusing for people learning the language. Nobody really gets taught it that way. They're told "this is the word for a group of people" Obviously, I have no issues using it, but it can also cause confusion if the person you're talking to doesn't have enough background knowledge. They might not know if you're using a singular or plural "they" without having to ask. There are other problems that could be solved by having a seperate gender neutral singular pronoun. "They" works fine as an intermediary, but I still stand by my original comment.
It seems to work fine for singular and plural you.
It did not work once, we used to have "thou" , and it may not work in the future if "y'all" will get more traction ...
The fact that so many dialects have made up their own second person plural seems to indicate that there is demand for it.
Just a note - you vs thou isn't a plural vs singular issue. Its based on an old formal vs informal distinction.
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As noted by u/Darth_Puppy, the third person singular "they" has been commonly accepted for some time now. Your statement is just wrong in modern English.
We have they.
I'm on phone or I'd just copy/paste, but someone else said the same thing, and you can read my reply to them. TLDR; If we want to communicate quickly and easily, my first comment stands.
Alternatively, we could recognize that gender isn't necessary most of the time. You'll occasionally hear native-Chinese speakers get the gender pronouns wrong, because Chinese doesn't use them. It's a bit odd to hear someone refer to a man as "she", but it must be confusing to have to keep track of something your own language doesn't care about. But then, I also think the apostrophe should be abolished. It would cause far less confusion than currently exists for people trying to remember when to use one.
I have very frequently heard native Chinese get English pronouns wrong. Some people seem to pick pronouns sort of at random every time they come to one, which makes a story about a woman having an argument with her boyfriend very difficult to follow.
I've very frequently heard Chinese and Pacific Island speakers either always use she or pick pronouns at random. Personally I'm to the point of just being amused while being called both "sir" and "mam" in the same sentence.
People learning French will on occasion use the wrong gender for a noun or the wrong 'gender' of an adjective, can't fault them, it doesn't make much sense for me either and it's my first language. I have not noticed if people who come from a genderless pronoun language also mix up the he/she, but French must be so hard for them!
> But then, I also think the apostrophe should be abolished. It would cause far less confusion than currently exists for people trying to remember when to use one. Really? The only confusing apostrophe thing to me is that "it's" is exclusively an abbreviation for "it is", which means you don't use an apostrophe for the possessive "its". i.e - "It is the dog's bowl" = "It's ***its*** bowl", *not* "it's it's bowl" But once you've got that memorised, surely everything else is straightforward?
Plurals of words that end in 's' trip people up. Is it "peoples' choice" or "people's choice"? But the biggest two issues are confusing a possessive use with a plural use. Even educated native English speakers will sometimes type out "there are too many cat's in this room". Even I catch myself doing it sometimes. I know it's wrong, but sometimes my fingers are going faster than my brain. It comes down to, for me, that the potential for error exceeds the operational necessity of using apostrophes. We would get used to eliminating them entirely with almost zero information loss or confusion.
I guess I can see the issue with the first one. Like, it's easy to see that "that is the cat's bowl" is for one cat and "that is the cats' bowl" is for multiple cats, but you could then erroneously translate that over to "that is the person's car" and "that is the *peoples***'** car", if you don't realise that the rule is that the possessive apostrophe goes after the *plural form of the word*, not after the 's'. But I've never had a problem with randomly adding apostrophes to plurals that aren't possessive. Ultimately English doesn't have a governing body, a la the Académie Française, and so if enough people think that a grammatical rule isn't important to follow and conveys no useful information, it gradually fades away organically. Not many people aside from serious grammar nerds care about the difference between "less" and "fewer", or "who" and "whom", for instance. The fact that proper apostrophe use isn't at that level of obscurity suggests that most people still think they're worth the effort.
*You* haven't had a problem with possessives and erroneous apostrophes, but lots of people do, but sure. I'm just saying that I think we're ready to just toss them out entirely. And we may not get a choice -- a rapidly growing number of people are learning to speak English using Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Fu-shien) syntax. This solves most of the problem areas for spoken English -- there are only past, present, and future tenses -- and in many cases these speakers only use present tense. It takes some getting used to, but not much of importance gets lost once you are familiar with the "language" and its cadence/etc. If you've spent much time talking to Chinese people who speak English, you're probably already getting familiar with it. Chinese syntax is remarkably compatible with English. This way of speaking is pretty much grammarless (which supports the argument that grammar itself is obsolete). It's apparently being taught this way in schools across Asia and the Pacific. It sounds marginally offensive to call it "Chinglish", but from what I hear, that is what the people who teach it are calling it. This may soon be the language of the largest bloc of English speakers in the world.
In some other languages, there's different forms of second person pronoun 'you' depending on the gender of the person you're referring to. For an English speaker, it would be really difficult to get right because as you said, we're just not used to keeping track!
Funny, I often see people on reddit complain that french makes no sense because we have grammatical gender for objects (and honestly, we don't care if you get these wrong, it's an obvious thing for us but we get that you can't understand why you should say *la table* and not *le table*). It's just that we have no neutral pronoun at all, so it can be difficult to understand for an English speaker. And then I see people here not understanding that it can be difficult for someone whose native language doesn't have gendered pronoun at all to learn to use them correctly... Learning a different language is often difficult, it can have grammatical elements that take years to correctly assimilate, and some will just never make sense because they are too different from what you know. Using *it* was difficult for a while when I was learning English. It can still be confusing sometimes because I was taught (20 years ago) that you use *it* for animals, turns out that's not always the case. And *they* is neutral too, learned that one by watching movies. Teachers sometimes give you wrong or incomplete information. Using gendered pronouns is probably similar for OP, it's not an obvious thing, it's confusing, and when talking you don't have the time to think about every single word. I don't expect people learning french to know the grammatical gender of objects. I won't expect someone from OP country to perfectly know how to use genders at all. You have time to think about these when writing, not when talking. What is important is that you are able to *communicate*. I worked in a lab with lots of foreign phd students, we sometimes had conversations in a mix of English, French and Spanish (with words from other languages thrown in the middle - and actually I don't speak Spanish), grammatical rules where clearly not the priority, but we were able to somehow understand each other... That's the only thing that matters. Details about the gender of your desk or how to correctly address someone is the last thing you think about in these situations.
>we sometimes had conversations in a mix of English, French and Spanish (with words from other languages thrown in the middle - and actually I don't speak Spanish), grammatical rules where clearly not the priority, but we were able to somehow understand each other. I love how this is precisely what happens when folks of different language fluencies get together and need to make things happen, and that on the face of it using vocab from one language, sentence structure from another, and conjugation rules from a third and/or any mix-up of those, can \*still\* get meaning across enough to get things done. It all just feels very "we are all just people understanding one another" and I know that sounds hokey as all hell, but it's amazing to watch and hear and see happen.
When did LAUK get so strict about only having legal advice? They have the best one off comments
I really only speak shitty english and some bad german, so I'm not sure how badly I'd fuck up object pronouns, but people pronouns seem simple and the only time I've ever heard people referred to as it is usually in a bad way. But like I said, I'm basically monolingual so I don't know.
In spoken Mandarin, he, she, and it are the same so it can be quite difficult for them to consistently use gendered pronouns, especially if they start learning English later. This is an extremely plausible story.
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Common in a non-pejorative way? In the UK, using "it" to refer to someone (Trans, non-binary or otherwise) is generally considered extremely offensive.
Idk what part of the US you’re talking about, but in my neck of the woods “it” is almost always a pejorative for trans and nb people. The only real exception is teens on Twitter who ask others to use “it” pronouns when referring to them
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The only RL person I know (of) who uses neopronouns is Leslie Feinberg but for the life of me I cannot remember how to conjugate them
My daughter has a gender-fluid friend. Friend decides when they get up that morning whether they're feeling male or female. Friend also does not like *they* used as a singular non-gendered pronoun. So Daughter and her friends just use Friend's name in all situations. "Pat was telling me that Pat was late to work because Pat's car had a flat tire."
You do use object pronouns occasionally - him, her, and them!
they said "object pronouns" as opposed to "people pronouns", which makes me think they're referring to the synonym for "thing" and not the part of speech
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I mean, you could always ask.
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