ENGLISH!

Somewhere between Summer and Autumn 1987, probably in an attempt to avoid me from being bored with only the Dutch language, school decided to give classes in English.

Obviously it changed a lot for me, finally getting to know this music and movie language from the UK and USA.
Our teacher started the first class with a story about the dutch mister Abels, who went to the UK and saw his surname changed to Ebels, Ibels and finally Aibels.
This story explained to me about 50% of the whole pronounciation.  Besides theoretical knowledge from school, the music and TV have helped a lot as well. And very soon I had a preference for british english, because the teacher said: American English, it is bubble gum english.

A couple of years later, English was being teached to us (us = my classmates and me) by a not always so friendly woman, especially for those who didn´t care about the language.
I switched to a different school, basically because of my terrible math results and again I had a nice and funny teacher. On hot summer days, we organized the "having an icecream during english class", and in Spring ´92 we went on a trip to London.

It was my first real "far" school trip and at that time, the Channel Tunnel was still being built. Thus our bus travelled through the Netherlands, Belgium and crossed the french border at Adinkerke-Bray Dunes.
The ferry was, if I remember correctly, from Calais to Ramsgate. I flipped some quids in the EuroFootballChamp arcade on the boat and saw the Cadbury candybars for the first time.

In Ramsgate, UK, the bus drove on the left side, we visited Canterbury and in London the whole group got split up. With two other colleagues, I went with a british gentlemen and we stayed with them. This is a common solution for students in Europe, 4 years later in Spain I lived there similar (but for 7 weeks instead of only 1).

The London week was nice, but our UK "mother" was not very permissive. Many kids could go to the pub, or do whatever they pleased. We were not that lucky. The group used to meet in the evenings, from 7 till 9, somewhere on a grass field, with a "sneaky smoke" and then our UK "daddy" would come to pick us up, we saw some telly and went to sleep.
Eventually we visited the typical things such as the Tower Bridge, Tower Hill, the squares, Westminster Abbey, the Big Ben etc. etc. and we used the tube a lot.
It was also the week in which the Champions League final was held at Wembley. Barça-Sampdoria, with a late free kick goal from dutch cowboy Koeman.

On the way back to the Netherlands, we arrived from England to France, added an hour on the clock and the Douane française checked the bus.
Meanwhile, after crossing the border in Belgium, the bus got some kind of technical issue. It was a sloppy belgian coach, on a hot day in the UK it was so dusty that someone fingerwrote B*TCH on it.

Due to the technical issue we stayed over an hour on a belgian highway parking site, and got back home at around 2:30 AM.

A year later I went to college (a dutch college, not highschool, it was just named college to give a certain "status" to the school). The rules were not that strict anymore. The college had the following opinion about absence:
They are not kids anymore. Most of the students are 18 years old. So if they miss a class, it is their own problem.
As a consequence of this, the first school hour, which occasionally was english class, suffered a lot of absence; people arriving half an hour late, or they didn´t even show up.
But still it was fun.

Meanwhile, on the dutch telly we already knew the most popular english series: Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses, the unforgettable mr. Bean, but maybe the best, the typical two "sweetie darlings" from Absolutely Fabulous.

Particularly, you could make a composition of the influences that YOUR specific way of speaking english is based on.
For me it would be a blend of AbFab, Fawlty Towers, The Clash, The Sex Pistols and Blur.

What happens a lot when someone who is not from the UK or USA, is that the person has difficulties or errors.
Reasons for this are, e.g.

1. Trying to translate from your source language (for example Spanish) to destination language English.
2. There can be similar words with different meanings in source and destination.
3. The person simply tries to write in "understandable english", regardingless all possible orthographical and grammatical errors.

Of course there are more reasons, but the above mentioned examples always repeat themselves. There was a time that I assisted my colleague D. with her classes.

The 4th reason, in this case, is related to the first one. Since there are translators all over Internet, of which Google translate is a splendid example, cause it (tends to) translate word for word. This causes laughter and issues with synonyms. So for the "copy paste translators"; hell yeah, well done. But please read and analyze what the online translator has just "vomited" onto your screen before using it.

Many times my colleagues ask me how they need to say "this and that" in English. The internet is a fantastic invention, because it will give you an answer always.
Another good technique is to avoid using words that are difficult. One of my first advices is always, to sail around the problem and be creative with language.

Now, here in Bolivia, the through the years gathered knowledge is very useful when contacting providers in the USA. If they are in the south (Texas, Florida, Arizona) then they will generally speak spanish, but not everywhere.

Compared to other languages, English is generally easier than German, French, Dutch or the languages from eastern Europe. And it is simply not the same thing watching movies and series synchronized to spanish.

The history of the language is described here:
http://www.englishclub.com/english-language-history.htm