Same in Swedish; eventually and eventuell((|a)|t) (meaning possibl(e|y)). I still have to think about that one for a while, while communicating in Swedish, interestingly enough since that's my mother-tongue.

While at Sheremetyevo airport near Moscow (on my way from Stockholm to Hanoi a couple years ago) I found a sign that said "Stuff only" and "Dlya personala" (I think, can't remember exactly - and I can't type in Cyrillic, so you'll have to do with a badly remembered transliteration), which I'm quite sure roughly translates to "staff only".

EDIT: Also, the Swedish word "personal" means "personnel" or "staff".

Didnt we all learn this in high school? I have never met the person who felt the "protagonist" was a "good guy" by default. Simply the main character who does things while the antagonist does things "to" directly or indirect to the Pro. This is the whole point of things like Batman, Josse Whales, Dirty Harry, etc... the anti-hero as it were.

Yes, but how many people remember everything they learned in high school? >.>

At the risk of sounding arrogant: I consider my written German as almost perfect. Grammer, spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, phrasing, eloquence, argumentation, I can't think of any weakness. You can test me if you doubt that. Let's debate! Expressing myself through written word is something I really enjoy, more than through spoken word.

And though my understanding of spoken English language is quite advanced too, thanks to many years of passive consumption (games, films, music), I often have a hard time writing and speaking it. The simple explanation for that is lack of practice. I just have none.

That's my excuse and also the reason why I'm not posting much. If this forum had areas for other global languages like French, Spanish and German, or at least some popular threads, my activity here would increase significantly. Nailing it in English is just to demanding for me.

Oh, and as an example for continuous mistakes I make and know of: I tend to mix up words that sound the same but have different meanings, like "few" and "view","to" and "too", or "were" and "where". That never happens to me in German, so again I think it's a matter of practice.

Actually, beyond that, even this use of "protagonist" doesn't exist in french. Well, it seems to exist, but in the limited field of scholar studies of greek antique theater. In common language, the enemy of the main character is "a protagonist" just as well, and is just as "antagonist" tho the hero as the hero is to him. We simply don't use "antagonist" as a noun, it's purely a (relational) adjective. And "protagonist" as a noun means all agents of a story.

So, even in this english acceptation of "protagonist" as "main character", it sounds terribly weird and awkward to my ears.

And, because of these arguments, it's nor a weirdness and awkwardness I enjoy. Whereas I adore the other words that have a close-but-not-quite-similar sense in english and french. The exemples given by other forumers there are typical : I take a manuellesque delight in saying "eventually" precisely because it sounds so weird to my own ears.

This reminds me of this clip, only with the opposite problem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18PJVNp40S0

Nowadays I tend to forget that I am not a native English speaker and often so do others. My interpretive process does not involve translating words. However, I have been told that my choice of words in writing may at times come across as harsh or unforgiving, so most of my quarrels have been due to a misunderstanding of tone. I don't always add the necessary smileys and cuss words to seem all friendly. ;-)
I am a bit of a perfectionist, so I'm quite bothered by my own typos and missing words (thinking, but not typing), but I've noticed that it is on the level of native speakers. The mistakes of native speakers often stand out to me, because I'm not always able to decipher the correct homophone with the added difficulty of accent or slang.

Pssh! Every language has its weird quirks. If you think apostrophes are annoying, try having a gender for every single noun in the alphabet. Or accentuation in different syllables and the rules that decide if the vowel with the accent uses an accent mark or not. Some of these things have its uses, but others make you think whoever came up with these was only thinking about flair instead of being practical.

Oh yeah, it's the same with German where "aktuell" and "eventuell" have the same meaning as their Polish counterparts, so people tend to mix them up. A few more ones come to my mind like "sensible" and the German "sensibel" (which actually translates to "sensitive").

Anyway, oddly enough I'm making rather few "funny mistakes" when talking or writing in English, I'm making a lot of them in Polish though. It's especially awkward since my accent is perfect, so these mistakes just make me sound like a Polish idiot, not a foreigner who grew up in an environment where barely anyone spoke Polish. People will sometimes grin or laugh at these mistakes, surprisingly rather people who know me well - strangers are more careful and will rather look confused or smile in a friendly manner once I've explained that I'm expressing myself oddly due to my background. Especially with my ex there was a lot of awkward misunderstandings, the most epic one being... well, too intimate for these forums. :p Now that I think about it, she was disgustingly impatient when it came down to solving these misunderstandings or explaining Polish words and phrases (and I felt like it was getting worse all the time, like she was expecting me to have perfected my Polish within a few months). Huh, in retrospect I should have known that she's a total bitch all along. :P

In Athens, a lady stopped the car next to me to ask for directions. I told her in greek that I didn't live there, but that I had a card, if she wanted. I insisted a lot on the fact I had a card, but she really didn't seem interested, and finally left.

I was later told that, unlike in french, the greek word for "card" is not the same as the greek word for "map".

Well, it's not quite as bad as the time my mum wanted to pay with a credit card, and asked the guy if he accepted Visa for payment, not realising how close the name was to the greek word for breasts.