Please do. To quote Snatch (stop tittering I mean the film.) 'I thought this country spawned the f*cking language, and so far nobody seems to speak it.'

Just make sure you teach correct spelling and not American (They have a bad habit of dropping silent letters and vowels.)

Yep!
Here in Spain, waiting to nationalize the biggest Bank in country (Bankia, this Friday) for a mere €20 Billion hole in their accounts. A Bank controlled by one of the political wings.

To have a perspective of the political-economical fiasco, Bankia bought 500 Millions of € in bonds of the Valencian Community (controlled by the same political wing) a week ago, and now is in the verge of filling bankruptcy and the state (same political wing) have to save them with €10 Billions.

10 Billions of € was the amount snipped from healthcare and education to reach the deficit limit.

I'm so proud of being Spanish...

I need to watch that movie again. Even though portions of it are quite hard for me to understand. I also need to watch more Misfits, even though a lot of it needs subtitles for me to understand. Obviously, those are hardly standard even for British English.

I always love when I get the option for both American and British English.

Why? Once you've seen one Eiffel tower, you've seen them all.

Did I tell already that a couple of years ago I was offered an interim job in a Thai village (in the rural area) to teach the local kids at school some English? (Interim = as long as I would have stayed there, I was on vacation.) It seems they had a severe shortage of teachers semi-fluent in English.

They didn't mention anything about the wage though (which I presume means they expected me to do it for free), so I told them that I am there only for the sun, not seeking work. But it would have been fun to teach the local kids my broken Finnish accent.

EDIT: Oh yeah and of course I didn't have any work visa if such would have been needed, but I'm unsure if the locals would have cared either way.

+1

Always gives you more perspective. In each country people are doing some things that are right and some things that are wrong. The funny thing is in most cases they can't explain why - it just seems to be a tradition/ random decision long time ago.

There's a good chance I'll be headed roughly your way, assuming I can find a job somewhere in a German speaking part of Europe. My German is fairly week, but I have the grammar knowledge to comprehend and would be able to pick up the vocabulary fairly quickly. Although, in a pinch I could probably pick up Dutch fairly quickly.

Most of the things that my family does that are odd are because some German person did it first and it got passed down well past the point where we arrived in the US. I always feel a bit odd trying to explain America to foreigners as a lot of it I don't get. It's odd growing up as a foreigner in your own country.

Yeah I know. But when I my family lived in England, they didn't do some vaccines so we had to go all the way back to 'merica. EDIT: I'd like to live in Germany as they have been carrying the euro zone.

You'll like some things here like driving at unlimited speed on highways if you are into it or thousand kind of sausages, beers, breads, but you'll also dislike many things. Anyway it will add to the experience. The language itself is not too difficult for english speakers. The grammar is a bit complex and it requires time to learn enough vocab. But otherwise it's nothing too difficult. And Dutch is regarded to be between English and German.

My parents came out of the German community in Wisconsin, so a lot of it was familiar when I visited during the late '90s. Of course there's also a ton of things that are different. But I was shocked at how many things I just understood as far as German customs go when I was taking German a few years back. In many ways it made more sense to me than the things I'm supposed to know about in America.

As for grammar, you can speak German sort of like English, it takes a lot of the variety out, but you can use English word order for a lot of things. The big difficulty IMHO is getting the cases right and the prepositions. German as I'm sure you know being a much more case oriented language and English being basically case free in many respects.

But, I did manage to internalize enough of it last time I was taking classes so that I can infer context from radio programs. It's extremely tiring, but it's not something that's easy to do.

But yeah, when it comes to Dutch when I see it written I have a fairly good idea what's going on sometimes, but it is definitely different.

This is coming up probably 8 months away and it's really going to depend upon getting a job before I go. I can't afford to spend a huge amount of time waiting around and hoping to find work. And EU citizens have priority on jobs.

May I recommend Greece? Or perhaps Spain? Easy living over there.
True, but think of all the single women in China that you have to pick from. So, there's that...

Yes, you're right, the most difficult things for foreigners are always the genders of the nouns and the cases and that you have to adapt the endings of all adjectives and pronouns accordingly. Not only is this quite redundant information but also there aren't many rules about the right gender and which preposition goes with which case. You just have to memorize everything.

All in all I like the english approach much better. Thank god everybody speaks english now - from all the languages available it's one of the easiest to learn.

On the other hand my daughter recently learned speaking german in less than one year (she is three years old). She mixes the genders and cases but it doesn't matter because you can understand her. So now we will start teaching her english.

If I want to have a Chinese wife one of the teachers offered to set me up. From what I understand marriage is more of a business proposition in China than it is back in the US. Which is in some ways more honest.

Watch Hot Fuzz

e: snippet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtOwOQi-DQI

If that's how you feel, accept my pity. As long as you have enough to preserve your life, then there's so much more to life than money.

I wish it was nationalized. But what they will do is inject €10 Billion of public money to revive what is essentially a private entity (although led by our "wonderful" politicians to finance their own shenanigans).

Me too. I'm considering seeking asylum in Iceland.