Growing up in post-communist Romania – thoughts on learning English

Re:Growing up in post-communist Romania – thoughts on learni... by dep_b on Friday August 30, 2019 @12:08PM (#20839896)

I had a guy in our local IKEA (mainland Europe) explain to us that using a certain combination of items for our closet doors would look "fugly", which led me to believe he mainly learned English at internet forums full of trolls.

It was not that the combination wasn't fugly, he was right about it. But I was somewhat surprised to hear that kind of language from a sales person.

Would there be 12yo kids somewhere out there in the world that can only express themselves in 4chan English?

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Re:Growing up in post-communist Romania – thoughts on learni... by proaralyst on Friday August 30, 2019 @12:20PM (#20840012)

Fugly isn't 4chan English, it's just slang. I grew up hearing people use it in real life.

I'd be unsurprised to hear it in TV programming aimed at teenagers, so perhaps he learned it from that

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Re:Growing up in post-communist Romania – thoughts on learni... by bitwize on Friday August 30, 2019 @01:04PM (#20840410)

Fugly is short for fucking ugly, and was slang at least as early as the mid-90s. (Butt-head: "She's what you call... fugly. Huh huh huh. Huh huh.")

I can see someone learning English from YouTube. I already hear tales here on Hackernews of someone's 3-year-old using "don't forget to like and subscribe" as a goodbye.

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Re:Growing up in post-communist Romania – thoughts on learni... by dotancohen on Friday August 30, 2019 @01:17PM (#20840527)

Twenty years ago I had a friend from Russia who had learned English from her time in theatre. She spoke perfect Victorian English, and was surprised to discover that is not how English is spoken today. For her, _that_ was English.

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Re:Growing up in post-communist Romania – thoughts on learni... by globuous on Friday August 30, 2019 @12:20PM (#20840020)

I actually learned to speak english in a fraternity. Some bad words would inevitably slip up at my friends’ parents’ houses when i’d be invited, it was embarrassing ^^ thankfully, my english’s improved a lot since ;)

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