Good day/night wherever you are.
This community is an amazing place. What makes this community amazing?
- This community is a great escape from the real world; everyone is together to talk about their passion freely.
- Activity - this community is very active. You make a topic, and you’ll get replies almost immediately, which is very nice.
- The people! People gather here from all corners of the world for this passion, making this community a wonderfully diverse place.
I created this topic about the last point on this list.
Lingual Challenges
As mentioned earlier, everyone here comes from different parts of the world, parts where the culture and language is very different from other parts where you may live.
This community’s main language is English.
Fun fact: 140 countries on this planet do not have English as their official language, which means that there is a substantial amount of IFC users here who have grown up with a completely different language spoken around them.
How to deal with this
Okay. Imagine this: you just started learning a new language, and you start speaking with people of the same language. This will help you a lot, particularly whilst speaking in that language and learning stuff about your hobby in that language. So you open a topic, and people reply with:
- ??
- What?
- I’m sorry but what?
You obviously know there is something wrong with what you said, but you still haven’t learnt anything.
If you see someone create a topic where you do not exactly understand what he/she is saying, please don’t respond with the examples above. Try something like this:
- Hey! Do you mean
example?
This is a lot politer way to handle things, and you’re trying to get the user to be able to express what he is thinking, so he/she can go on having fun in the IFC.
Additionally, do not use fancy words that I am using in this topic, for example: thus, whereas, and other words that don’t really occur throughout other languages.
Another point to to consider is when someone opens a new topic, and you do not know what he is saying, please, do not say something like this:
- I think he/she is trying to say…
- No, he/she means this…
It’s basic manners not to refer to someone as him/he/her/she when that person is also in the conversation. Instead of saying something as above, you should say something like:
- Hey! Do you mean
example?
As I said, you only use these above mentioned pronouns when that user is not around: in a PM, for example.
Please note that this is a friendly reminder, and I am not purposefully targeting people who say this, but simply trying to make this community as friendly as possible.
I am pretty guilty of the above discussed topics above myself, so out of my own experience I was able to create this topic.
Anyways, that’s it. Please just remember this topic when talking to anyone on the IFC.
Have a nice day/night wherever you are,
Rian.