Exactly 
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Ye, that for sure!
I wasn’t even thinking about typos bc that is something you can find at any time and any place
In general, unless it is done by professional subbers, I prefer watching foreign language shows with English subs. Mainly because English is almost all the time shorter than German (it is easier to watch and look at short 1 syllable long words in a row than trying to read and watch at the screen at same time; French is similar long as German, sometimes even longer so I wonder how they handle reading and watching at once without using pause button 
)
That’s a good point but sadly, different to the Korean dramas here the Chinese dramas don’t get the same treatment, e.g. you mentioned all the special terms like:
Chinese has many special addressings that show the relation between persons and also their status (in general and to each other) but so far in all the Chinese dramas I watched here the English subs are always using this version
but the problem is that because of that the cultural aspects get lost and also causing misunderstandings (sometimes) because in Chinese
is not always the same (they have different words/signs for it, depending e.g. on being blood related or not). In English the Older Brother cuts it down to the ‘yo bro’ mentality of today’s hip hop/rap/gangster style (I watched German TV movies/shows in which all the employees of a music studio within the rap/hip hop scene called each other ‘bro’ and also some gamers/streamers do that but usually within a certain type of community, not in general).
Some other language teams sometimes use the correct Chinese terms, but in general there is rarely a difference if you watch a Chinese drama here or on Netflix (sometimes Netflix keeps special terms that are fully translated into English/other language here…).
So for me it is sad that only Japanese and Korean get a treatment that keeps more cultural aspects alive even after being translated into English.
(I forgot to mention that in my first post.)
Of course it is much more work to keep all (or many) special terms but I think that is (or should be) the main difference between fansubs and general audience subs as you wrote here
One of my international friends said the English that is mainly/mostly used today is called Global English by a French philosopher/linguist and that it is not ‘the English’ native speakers would use in their local areas. (It is an interesting approach, I’d like to know how much differences exist and if it’s just about less words in general or about different word groups that are used).
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Oh it is interesting!
Does your friend remember the name of the guy or his work?
From my personal exp:
In English class, we had books and materials with excerpts from books written by native speakers or articles from BBC news. Typical American songs too like Bob Marley’s songs and poems.
As for teachers, as far as I remember, they were mostly American speakers and British speakers who they lived in America or England for a period of time.
For international exams like the FCE like Cambridge test (thanks Irmar for making me take a look, because I began to do more free FCE quiz LOLOL and sometimes I was like, wtf what to choose??), I saw articles from BBC with holes where you pick the correct word or it’s reading an article and answer questions.
How was it for you and everyone else when you have been taught English?
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I didn’t even know, but apparently yes:
They are suffering a lot indeed. 
But I do like the book and the way it’s written. And it was a present from my Korean friend.
Yeah, for me it’s also ages ago and of course, as we change, we experience books and movies from back then in a totally different way.
Okay, I will.
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Her name is Barbara Cassin, but I didn’t read something from her by myself so I don’t know in which context she mentioned it (my friend also said that Global English would erase ‘local/native’ English in the long run but I’m not sure if she said this or if it’s the interpretation of my friend).
We never had native foreign language speakers as teacher, that was of course bad for us (but our French teachers were usually more dedicated and spend/lived some time in France so their teaching was much better, besides that French is more similar to German and Latin than English in certain aspects - I’m not talking about the language tribe, I mean other aspects).
Our English teachers used nice Oxford English at grammar school, which was great but ‘whatever’ kind of US American at high school (which was terrible, also the books and topics were not interesting and worse than the books at grammer school with Oxford English). Of course the movies and audio lessons sound also different (I had much trouble to understand the US American stuff). So it was no fun to learn or spend time with it.
Sometimes we read extracts of native authors, mostly from UK but since we learnt US American the wording/words were different… (really bad teaching concept).
And in German class we read TRANSLATED UK books too! As if we don’t have German authors who wrote their novels in German…
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At highschool we were supposed to learn Brittish English, while at the same time most other English influences that reached us (music, movies, etc.) were American or Canadian and occasionally Australian.
In the first few years or so we had to read little English books, adaptions from regular books, made into relatively simple books for language learners. We had to read one each week. In later years we had to read regular English books, originally written in English, but it didn’t matter from which English-speaking country they came. During the oral part of our final exam we had to talk about a whole list of books we read (also for most other languages). Within certain restrictions we got to choose the books on the list ourselves.
Before all that we had had some English lessons in the last class of elementary school, but not much, cause our teacher there didn’t really see the point of it. He actually said he would have preferred us to learn French!
And my elder sister taught me some English when I was really young.
Later, for my Swedish studies, I lived in Finland for a year, and there I communicated in English with the other international students. Some of them were from English-speaking countries (mostly Canada, Ireland and England), but the majority had different mothertongues.
And the last few years I communicated a lot in English online. And I still read English books.
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I’m shocked! All the books we had to read for each language class HAD TO BE originally written in that specific language, including the German books. And there’s choice enough, I would think …
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Yep, it would make more sense when it is as you mentioned.
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My CM is careful that we use Older Brother, Second Uncle, Third Brother, etc. on a Chinese drama. I watched Dreaming Back to the Qing Dynasty and they addressed everyone as Fourth Brother, Seventh Brother, Thirteenth Brother, etc.
I was born in a country which was part of the British Commonwealth so we commonly spoke and spelled the British way. An elevator was a lift; a car trunk was a car boot; tomato sounded like tomahto. After we moved to Canada, I found Canadian English is even different that English in the U.S.A.
Canadians tend to use American vocabulary but British spelling, except for certain -ize words (in which case we use the American spelling). We put a “u” in words like “colour” and “favour”; Americans leave it out. We spell “theatre” and “centre” with an “re” at the end; they spell with an “er”. British English still insists on a c in the word defense. “Eh” is also known as Canadian speech because it denotes politeness, friendliness and inclusivity. “Eh” softens a sentence to involve the listener, asking their opinion on the matter. Grey is the British spelling, so Canadians may well use it. However, grey is considered a variant of gray.
In the U.S., issuing an apology is often framed as an admission of inadequacy, weakness or guilt. Here we say ‘sorry’ as polite courtesy, thus Ontario province had to make a law to literally limit the liabilities of chronic apologizers. British people whom I personally know have a difficult time saying “Sorry”. We say “zed” but Americans say “zee.”
Limits on speech were incorporated in the Canadian criminal code in relation to treason, sedition, blasphemous and defamatory libel, disruption of religious worship, hate propaganda, spreading false news, public mischief, obscenity, indecency and other forms. I believe U.S.A. still has free speech. We Canadians tend to be more circumspect
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… maybe you don’t know all the story or maybe you know 
but the person you keep mentioning didn’t agree to continue to support the strike against Vikibot (she has the right of course). But the reason why was kind of… I mean, it’s contradictory.
Normally if I am for the quality, I say and show something in that sense
Nevermind, just my thought, I’m not going to say more about it, because it’s the past already but it leaves something bitter, maybe not for me, but for some others who feel that solidarity was an old concept and so we might be a little taken aback 
Have you finished the book? Like would you recommend it?
Wow! We never had to read books in English in my case. It’s impressive all the books you have to read in a language that is not your native language! Plus tests!
I have to say that one reason I can’t buy the French version is because it’s only in English and no translation yet.
Or the price xd the translated book is more expensive xd
Ooh I will take a look if I can find something (and if I can understand lol).
Lol I found it funny! In our case, we had both words (US/UK).
It’s been such a long time for me. I don’t remember the topics xd my bad memory, I think it was about some important figures in UK, US, also festivities or common topics like developping countries, also economics.
But our system of learning English in France is known to be like a poor system lol
But they’re doing efforts to teach English at a very young age at school.
Ooh Oxford English grammar, I will take a look! Thanks!
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Not yet. So far I would definately recommend it though. It’s beautifully written and also teaches some Asian history along the way. And I love the cover too:
At highschool we had to read books in Dutch, English, French and German. Later at uni I also had to read books. For Swedish we could read translations in the first year, but after that we had to read them in Swedish. I did Norwegian as a side course, so I read some books in Norwegian as well.
However, for Finnish we were never forced to read a book in Finnish. Probably because it would have taken us far too long to get fluent enough to be able to read a whole book in Finnish in a comfortable way, haha. We did have to translate a lot from Finnish though. But Finnish literature came to us by English, Dutch, German and (in my case also) Swedish translations.
Yes, translations are usually more expensive. After all, the translators need to eat as well. Would you prefer a French version though?
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Oh yes, if I’d read everything that is written in English in origin version I’d save so much money 
btw amazon did some ‘ebook event’ bc of corona. They reduce the price for certain American/British ebooks a lot and set some audiobooks to 0 €. So the book that mentioned ‘Wuhan-virus’ (and was written 40 years ago) was reduced to around 47 cent for English version but normal price for German version… (10-15 €).
I would have had no problems with writing free texts in French but in English is was terrible… I had all the French in mind but couldn’t remember English words
And then, many years later, when I trained English more I forgot most of the French 
I think we had similar topics but the topics for the American books were somehow less interesting because it was more about boring daily life stuff, instead of some cultural/history things or fictional figures that ‘tell’ you about their life/family… I think the American lecture book had 1-2 fictional characters that were just dumb so I didn’t like their ‘stories’ and also not the city in which they lived.
Thanks for the English wording insights.
About the Chinese wording: There is more than just the ‘ranking’ with the numbers; in English (and other European languages) the brother/sister says nothing about being blood related or not. In Chinese you can use different signs/terms so you’d know much more about the status and relation of a person.
I can give you a very simple example how English addressing/titles could cause a mess:
Old Third Sun
=> Assumption: old 3. sun (like moon)
but the true meaning was
Sun Lao San
=> “Old 3” Sun (= family name); ‘Sun’ does not mean the solar star…but if you just see the English you’d think it is the star…
In German you could write ‘Alte Drei’ Sun which looks even more weird and confusing. You could change the word order to Sun, die ‘Alte Drei’ but well…
Using ‘Sun Lao San’ would be most elegant.
You cannot expect the English main team to add all the special, sometimes 1-time-used titles to the team notes. So the loss of information and precision rises with every new translation: origin language > English > target language.
Keeping the origin Chinese term would cause less loss for target languages.
Sometimes origin Chinese dialogues use wording/combinations that don’t exist in that way in English but do exist in German; so a German word could be closer to the Chinese origin expression than the English translation but if one depends on the English > target language translation this special nuance would also get lost.
I’m mentioning this here because I faced several situations like that and it was quite interesting to see a direct Chinese > German translation without the English in the middle.
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I know the problem. I learned German at school and had even watched a lot of German tv in my younger years, but after I had started studying Swedish each time I would try to say something in German only Swedish words would pop up in my mind. 
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I’ll add it to my list of books to read then!
I think I prefer the original version, the original language of the writter because it’s the closest to understanding and feeling what the author wants to convey. But I have to understand the targeted language then.
If it’s a book in a language I don’t know, I just look at the price in English or French.
If it’s something technical like psychology, I tend to look for books in my language, because I want to understand first how people name it in my language and making sure I understand a concept before knowing how people name it in another language.
Yes, it depends on the topic, if it’s about the history of France, I will look for French books because they will know better. If it’s about the history of Korea, I found more ebooks in English than in French, so I don’t have much choice and I don’t understand Korean.
But even if I found more books in English than in French for this special topic, I enjoyed better the French author because his book was well written and this is what I was looking for whereas some English books tend to focus on a particular event (which is also good), but then if I haven’t read the first book in French, it was already too detailed in the English book because I didn’t have knowledge in the background, so…
Or they focus on archeology and different styles of vases and differences between them. For someone who wants to discover first, it was not what I wanted to discover first lol I think being in a museum and discovering the history of an item is better.
I am so surprised how it is different from a country to another to learn a language or a set of languages in your case xd I would have loved to learn more languages in school!
What was your favorite language?
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Lol I didn’t know, I’m going to check it out!! Thanks for the tip!
Such a pity! I’ve heard that once you learn it, even if you forgot, it was easier to learn it again (less time) or to remember it!
Mmm I think it depends on the program lol
In our manuals, they put many topics and the teacher picked the article or excerpt in this topic that she prefered. Sometimes, I just turned the pages and when something would catch my eye and we didn’t see it in class (could be a flyer, a comic strip, a satirical drawing or a catchy title or etc.), I would read or learn more words I wanted to know. I think it’s a pity that in school, sometimes we could be taught in a way that doesn’t arouse our curiosity or we aren’t “taught” to be curious. But as a child, we were all curious. It depends on the teaching method.
Oh and we also watched a few movies in the original language with subtitles just before holidays
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Ye I think that’s right. I can still understand some French but I cannot build free lines at the moment. I start watching some Mexican show last year and now I’m watching season 2 and start to understand more without reading the subs (but I can only understand the Mexican Spanish, another show with European Spanish was not understandable). I think if one learns languages like French/Latin/Spanish/Italian you can understand more basic words easily. I think it takes around 30-50 episodes for me to understand few short simple things and after 100+ episodes I understand more but that does not work for all languages in the same way (I think there is some kind of affinity to a language and then it is easier to get into it).
It was like that for us as well. Teachers should give students more choice then they’d learn more by themselves. I think I often read the things in books I liked but were never a topic of the classes… also for history… so I usually knew more than others. Sometimes we were forbidden to read further but I did it anyway. Could happen then that I knew something the others didn’t and then I said just read the next page and they then said ‘but that wasn’t a homework by the teacher’. Sometimes we just should read one page when the whole text about a topic had like 5 pages or so… and then of course I read the complete text and not just 1-2 pages (because I thought it does not make sense to stop reading an article about a topic completely).
Oh you even got subs 
if it was foreign language movie subs were not allowed. Otherwise it was always synced version
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Good. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
I totally agree.
It might also be interesting to read a Korean perspective on French history …
You can still learn them! But, yeah, I agree it would have been nice to learn them earlier in life.
In highschool I would say Latin and in university Finnish. But there are a lot of languages I like.
What are your favourite languages? Is there any language you still want to learn someday?
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I don’t have a favorite language. I didn’t get to learn many languages!
Mmm… all languages are interesting to learn LOL I don’t know, I would pick Japanese + Russian and Dutch first, because I want to speak Dutch and Russian with my nephew and my step-sis. But I’m currently busy with English and Chinese so when will I have the time
Indeed, all languages are interesting. Why can’t we just learn them all, hahaha?
Are your nephew and step-sis Dutch or Russian? If you need any help/advice/whatever with Dutch, you know where to find me.
I actually did Russian as a side course when I studied Finnish, but I also forgot a lot of it. It was a very intense course. We learned everything there was to know in a short period of time with little time for repeating, so it didn’t totally stick. Although I do agree with your earlier statement that it’s easier when you learn it again. But yeah, time and distraction by all those other nice languages …
Chinese and Japanese are also on my wish list. Still working on my Korean.
And at some point I bought a Mongolian course book, but shortly after I received it my dad died and by now I still haven’t started learning Mongolian.
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