Quote:
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... billion billiard trillion ...
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LOL, GermanSteve, this was an invitation!
Would the Reverend not have taken it already, i couldn't have resisted to it,
melikes playing Billard with language, too!
(Serious now) British, Australian, NewZ folks, how is the proper wording for 10^6 (million),10^9, 10^12, 10^15, 10^18, 10^21, 10^24, etc.? I know American call 10^9 a billion, 10^12 and a trillion, but i have no idea how the British for example call it.
Length dimension units: 1 mil seems to a 1/1000 of an inch whereas 1 micron seems to be 1/1000 of a millimeter. Confusing. Well, don't ask engineer Bernhard about American style how to dimension components, tap pitch, gear pitch, whatever. Confusing.
In Germany it is meanwhile almost standard to have English skills, atleast basic level. Nevertheless the language barrier is high, a German person with good English skills often can judge from the choice of words and the weird, all too familiar looking grammar that the originator of those lines is "a bloody German". Mrs.Lix, to me the grammar of the examples from Dutch PA you posted looks very familiar, Dutch grammar and sentence contruction obvioulsy is very similar to German one.
Moreover, quite some terms exist completely ununderstable to native speakers.There are a few terms i hesitate to use as i have received blank stares from native speakers, using them. Do you know what a "handy" is? a mobile phone, a cell(ular) phone. And what is an "outing"? I am not sure what this term meaning in English; in German it is used as noun and as transitive verb and means that one person volunteers another person's slippery secrets, e.g. being homosexual or BDSM-oriented drug-addicted or being a snitch or whatever; part of the game is that either the pubilc or the "outed" person or both have not agreed to the "outing" and are ...hmmh... not particularly happy with it. The "outing" person however does not care. Of course, the person can "out" him/herself, again, not caring whether the others want to hear it.
native speakers,
Q1: How is this sort of behaviour called in English?
Q2: what other English terms were not understandable to you (from Dutch, German, Finnish, Japanese people etc., list is incomplete)? as i would like to add them to my list.