One person said when he studied Mandarin, he studied Japanese first because it’s preferential for him to use a Mandarin book for a Japanese person, because 80% of the vocabulary come from Chinese.
And another person replied :
I’m doing the exact same thing myself in learning Italian. I’m dangerous in Spanish and it’s much easier for me to, sort of, absorb Italian with Spanish as my, sort of, orientation point.
As I cannot listen to audio at the moment (technical problem), I cannot check whether there’s a typo in the transcript. There are a number of possibilities:
My Spanish is so bad, I’m dangerous when I use it (because I make the most awful errors).
My Spanish is so good, I can use it as a weapon.
The speaker is using ‘dangerous’ as meaning ‘well bad’ or some other kind of fashionable expression…
(We don’t double or triple punctuation marks in English. One question mark at the end of a sentence is enough to indicate that it is, indeed, a question.)
Perhaps the phrase “I’m dangerous in Spanish” is an allusion to the phrase “armed and dangerous.” Here it may mean that the person’s knowledge of Spanish is strong enough to make him “dangerous” if he chooses to use it as a “weapon.”
"(We don’t double or triple punctuation marks in English. One question mark at the end of a sentence is enough to indicate that it is, indeed, a question.) " ?!?
What is all this about not using double or triple punctuation in English??? We do!!! Sanne does, and I do, and many others do, regularly, for emphasis. Not in formal texts perhaps, but in informal communication for sure:-)
Funny, I’ve always thought it was the words that were supposed to do all the emphasis work.
To me the overuse of punctuation marks—especially the question mark and the exclamation point—denotes messiness, immaturity, and disrespect to the reader. How are two or three question marks supposed to affect a question? Make it questioner? Attract more attention to it? If so, then why? Is it more important than other people’s questions? Or do the triple question marks indicate the poster’s indignation? Is he mad at, dare I say it, the English language for coming up with phrases that the poster does not understand? Are we supposed to feel sorry for the poster or ashamed for letting such phrases to creep in the language in the first place?
Or are we simply to ignore the extra question marks? If so, why use more than one to begin with?
Then again, perhaps it is customary in the poster’s native language to use multiple identical punctuation marks for emphasis. If so, it was only fair that I drew his attention to the fact that it is not customary to do so in English. In English, punctuation marks play their particular roles. You should trust the reader and trust the punctuation marks. They are quite capable creatures if used correctly.
Multiple punctuation marks are common among young, immature posters who are not yet familiar with the power of words (or, indeed, the power of punctuation marks themselves). Their limited—I’d even say, rudimentary—knowledge of the language is crippling, and so they naturally try to compensate with the overuse of punctuation. Quite understandable, but hardly attractive, and by all means not exemplary.
I think I managed to get my point across without doubling or tripling my question marks. Moreover, I didn’t use a single exclamation point, ellipses, or (god forbid) an emoticon.
The lovely thing about language is that it is ours, to use how we want. We have our style, our own, and some like it and others don’t. I have good friends in rural Alberta and they all say “I would have went” etc. I don’t but I would never correct them. They all seem to communicate quite comfortably.
When my wife emails me at work, I can immediately tell the tone of the content, and so what’s in her mind, by the number of exclamation points and question marks.
Multiple exclamation points or question marks indicates a certain incredulity, albeit in a jovial “can you believe this?” sense.
Single punctuation marks shows a slightly darker side - “I’m not really too happy about this” kind of thing.
No punctuation generally means I’m in trouble.
