Present perfect tense question

Anonymous wrote:

Goodman wrote: So for the last time, would the real English experts comment on it.? Hmmm. So, you mean the forum has some fake English experts?

Um…. I think you try to throw me into any angry mob, don’t you?

Of course I don’t mean that. Without so many words, I think we have

many levels of experts here. I know I am not among them. So anyone

whose English knowledge surpassed mine is an expert to me.

My mother tongue is Cantonese. I also learned Mardarin / Putongqua which is the official Chinese language in the Mainland at the same time I was learning English. Learning two languages at the same time really was quite a workout for my brain! I was Hong Kong born and have lived in the US for about 20 years.   What else would you like to know?

Time does not qualify one to be an expert of something. A guy working in as a prep cook for 20 years doesn’t qualify him as a chef. Don’t you agree?

There are many immigrants living in the US for as long as or even longer than I have but didn’t bother to seriously learn the Language. The meaning of native to me is someone was born and raised, and speaks this language all his life.  At the best, I maybe qualified as “half-native”.  

Um….Where do I begin?  Well, I am almost sure one or two of you on this forum may have already heard the story before. As I’d said many time before, learning English is much harder for Asians than Europeans for the simple fact that Asian langauges  are not made up of alphabets, except Vietnamese. For Asian born Chinese, the movement of their tongue and jaw has been trained into the muscles from speaking their native dialects.  It’s difficult to re-train them to move in the ways English speaking demands them of moving which in turn causes pronunciation problems for them. 

So for a young immigrant who never learned the basics of English, it would seem extremely impossile to learn this language, as least for a period about 2 years. I was 17 when I arrived Calif.  But not until 2 years later that I really seriously spent a lot of time studying.  The way I learned English is not what you would call academic. In fact, I don’t have a college degree because I had to work right away to survive. I couldn’t go to regular high school for I won’t understand anyway.   My existence for next 5 years was working in the Chinese restaurant at night and went to ESL classes during the day.  After I felt confident with my English, I enrolled into a technical college to take the next step, not knowing if I could make it through.  I can confortablly now tell you, if you had enough will in you, you can conquer almost anyting. Through my experience, I found out if you are humble to learn people will teach you. Through the years, I’ve kept up with this attitude of practicing what I’d learned and refining it.

I’d also like to shar ewith you that television, up till today, has been my best learning tool. It helped me build my speech patterns and word usage by listening and visuals. I am still trying  to keep improving my written skills by emulating others writing style. That’s why I want to do what little I can to help others because I know how confusing, depressing and frustrating it can be to become fluent in English.  To answer your question about proficiency, I would say this, I feel  condifident about my English and my ability to express my thoughts clearly. Whether my English is better than native American is not really imporatant to me. Hope my story didn't bore you to tears!