Is my short little paragraph about photosynthesis correct?
One comment - "Oxygen is released and hydrogen bonds with ADP and NADP". - not quite right. Water is split into oxygen and H+ (used to reduce NADP to NADPH) and electrons (used to replace electrons in chlorophyll which result in ATP synthesis).
A 3-paragraph letter to President Andrew Jackson evaluating the Indian removal policy from different perspecti
This 3-paragraph letter to Andrew Jackson from the perspective of the Southwest tribal member expressing your views on his Indian removal policy and how it affects your life as a Native American.the purpose for writting the letter is to influence the president,not to antagonize him. REFERENCE:The Indian Removal Act affe ted peaceful Native American groups that had been considered sovereign(self-governing)nations and held their lands by treaty with the United States
I'm a non-native speaker with very little accent, but my coworkers often don't understand me when I try to make a point in meetings. What’s wrong?
This is tricky without hearing an actual example of you speaking. If you’ve got an example you can provide that would help. I assume we’re talking about English here?First of all, are you sure you have very little accent? How do you know you have a native-sounding accent? If you resemble an Appalachian American and you’re working in Aberdeen, Scotland, people may struggle to understand you. Both areas are home to native English accents, but they very different!Following on from that, where are you working? Big, multinational and multicultural cities like New York, London and Singapore will be filled with people who are used to hearing a wide variety of accents. Less cosmopolitan cities will be filled with people who may struggle to understand (or maybe choose not to) anything even just a little bit different to what they are used to.Finally, there are plenty of native English speakers that I, as a native English speaker, scarcely understand. You say you pay attention to intonation, but clear diction is extremely important. It is quite possible that you are mumbling or slurring your words without realising. You might be speaking a lot faster - some languages are simply spoken faster than others, and you may be continuing to speak at your ‘native rate’ whereas English is actually spoken fairly slowly compared to, say, Spanish.If you can provide any more specific details this will help people answering.
How hard is it to learn English for non-native speakers?
It's hard for us to be objective about our own language. But I would agree with Tim that it is fairly easy to learn minimal, functional English, and very difficult to speak complex, fluent English. In terms of the basics, English has a pretty simple grammar-- it doesn't have much gender, the endings are simple (-s, -ed), and the pronoun set is small (it has one level of respect). When I visited Vietnam there were boys who could speak quite good minimal English: "You want a postcard? Good price." In comparison, the Korean I am trying to learn requires me to use different grammar for the respect level of the person I'm speaking to, has two number systems, and seems to have a different verb for every type of action or weather! (In English, do and make covers most.)But English gets torturously hard at the upper end. Its writing system doesn't match its sounds. Its grammar is full of exceptions. Its verb tenses are inconsistent, because it has taken different tenses from different languages. It is ridiculously picky and random with articles (a/the)-- this in turn drives Koreans insane. You usually can't tell a word's part of speech by its ending. Prepositions make no sense (in the car, on the bus, at 3:00, on Tuesday?). The language has duplications, half-synonyms, and nuances all over the place in its vocabulary, depending on which language the word comes from. Every third damn word seems to be a sexual joke nowadays, or has an idiomatic meaning!
Please Native Speakers help me I really really need your help :)?
can you please look through this paragraph and tell me if I have any grammatical mistakes please, thank you. As Michael Dorris said that in learning about Native Americans, “One does not start from point zero, but from minus ten”. First of all, in almost every book Native Americans are presented from the European point of view. The pictures in most historical books depict Native Americans as somewhat primitive and savage; while in fact Native Americans were struggling to develop the strategy in order to protect their lands. Second, the authors of Historical text book do not focus on the cultural background of Native Americans; they treat it as being irrelevant. (For instance, when Europeans were trading their goods like hats, scarves..etc with the nearly naked Native Americans.) And lastly, there were too many disparities; the definition of freedom was not a single idea, in contrast it contained a numerical means for both Native Americans and Europeans. The main problem was that it was unfortunately really hard for newcomers to understand that they were just visitors on this land. Europeans were just driven by the expandability of their power and influence, while completely ignoring the Native Americans’ point of view and simply treating them as savages.
Are the English tenses correct in this multilingual paragraph?
I'm not a native speaker, but I am at the very least C1 and want to test my abilities when it comes to teaching the language so I'll give it a go :)His ancestors were German, but when his great-grandparents immigrated to America, they changed their surname from Meister to Master, and as the years passed, the German influence on his family weakened. His parents spoke little German and he spoke almost none, but even though the language hadn't been passed down from one generation to the next, one phrase certainly had – "Fünf Minuten vor der Zeit ist deutsche Pünktlichkeit." It meant you had to arrive five minutes early to be on time.I'd really appreciate it if a native speaker would point out any mistakes I made, and above all, mistakes in the correction itself.
What do non-native speakers find most difficult about learning English?
The main problem with English is its (not "it's") exceptions. Exceptions in the pronunciation, exceptions in the spelling (pronounce, pronunciation), exceptions in the irregular verbs, exceptions in the use of tenses, exceptions in the position of the words ("I often eat chocolate", "I am often attracted to chocolate"), and the list goes on and on. Learning a rule is generally just the tip of the iceberg in English.Being a French who started learning English as a toddler with native English speakers, I'd say that if you haven't had the chance of learning at an early age, you'll also struggle with pronunciation a lot. How to pronounce a written word is one thing that needs years of effort to master (even for native speakers), but how to make the correct sounds with your mouth in the first place is something else altogether. And then once you've learnt how to pronounce it, you go to a different part of the world (say from the UK to Texas) and they'll talk gibberish to you when you get there because of the different accents until your ear gets used to the new pronunciation.Then there are the tenses, these wicked tenses. Look at that one: "I'd say that if you haven't had". How many foreigners tear their hair out on these.Then there are the prepositions and the verbs. They exist in some languages (like German) but most people will "go nuts" with "go to", "go into", "go across", "go as", "go at", "go by", "go for", "go off", "go on"... all that with a single verb (the list is endless, this is just an excerpt).English is a difficult language indeed. :)
What were the major patterns of Native American life in North America before Europeans arrived?
Which region/tribe? If your teacher thinks you can sum it up in a few sentences, you are not being given a quality eduaion. If I were you, I'd write "Among the existing 500+ native american tribes who make up the surviving 4% of indigenous peoples (94% were wiped out after European invasion) there is so much diversity in climate, region and culture that it is impossible, despite what little we have learned in class, to even begin to describe the patterns of their pre-columbian lifestyles. To assume that we, non natives, can sum it all up and compare each tribe to each other in a few paragraphs shows how great the ignorance of the people who developed this curriculum is. If you are asking me to list the general sterotypes such as, they were semi nomadic hunter/gatherers who lived off the land and were highly superstitious, then there you go. I will not mention the great cities along the Missippi river that influenced the Mayan, Aztec or Inca cultures. I wont talk about eco friendly gardening styles that made otherwise barren land into prime farming areas. I wont talk about the irrigation systems, plumbing or pueblos of the Anasai, or the canoe cultures of the pacific northwest. " You may get an A+ for your answer or a letter sent home, but it is the only honest way to answer such a question.