Hello! My name is Alice and I'm here to practise my English writing skills.
Thank you so much for the reviews on my first post, I will start to actually study English now actually i realised how my English suck
One thing I noticed is that i got corrections on my text about how informal it was, and I suddenly realised that in many countries formality is A THING. In Brazil NO ONE speaks formally, no matter the situation (unless is for business, like your boss or your client, but not even that). I thought this formality thing was only for more conservative countries, like Japan/Korea, but I guess its the same for the US too.
About another topic, yesterday was my b-day! Since it was a national holiday, there wasn't a SOUL in my town, that means everything was closed, which it made finding a place to eat a very difficult task, but I ended eating a green ravioli, which was very good by the way. I got some money as a birthday present, so I'm going to spend buying clothes for myself, since the ones I had got short, and they're not my style anyway, but buying clothes in Brazil is SO EXPENSIVE I may actually cry.
Anyways, I don't have anything to talk about, so that's it
Byee
I've been struggling with a similar frustration: how can I become comfortable with formality (and related things)? American English is my first language - and the New England dialect. People tend to be very direct and switch quickly to informal styles.
The Southeast US is the most formal dialect region, maybe the Midwest is second. New England is relatively informal and personally I've found myself very comfortable with Brazilians online. Maybe it's not that big of a gap.
I wish this site had a good way to classify corrections - (Simple grammar error, doesn't hurt communication) (Communication unclear) (Communicates clearly but sounds foreign) - things like that. For example "my clothes got short" isn't something that native speakers say but it's very clear and I like it. English doesn't ONLY belong to native speakers after all.
I only see one unclear moment. We say things like "some ravioli" or "a plate of ravioli" (grammar keyword: mass noun) so "a ravioli" sounds like it maybe means one piece of ravioli. So I imagine either a single big piece or a sad, small birthday meal - that's probably not correct but I hope you find that image funny. (Happy birthday!)
Our ravioli can be pretty small, by the way, as small as a square 40mm on a side. ("An inch and a half" is what I think.) So a serving is a whole plate and you wouldn't think about how many pieces.
I hope the [more like native] and [better grammar] tags are clear, but please feel free to ask.