Scripsit ille Richard Liang <rhliang@interchange.ubc.ca>:
> Rudolf Polzer wrote:
> >BTW: Do you learn American or British English in Canada? Geographically
> >it looks like you learn AE - historically you should be learning BE.
> >What's your pronounciation of "can't": [c$(D??(Bnt] or [ca:nt] ($(D??(B is the
> >phoneme that is the only vowel of "back")? The former is AE, the latter
> >is BE.
> 
> I believe we learn British English as far as spelling goes, i.e. 
> "colour" instead of "color" and what not.  I understand that they used 
> to spell the word "tire" as "tyre" but we don't do that anymore.  As for 
> the pronunciation we say the former (the one with the umlaut).

Interesting... so you write BE and pronounce AE. What a tradeoff...

> >And I didn't even take English for 9 years like it's normal in Germany -
> >I started, like everybody else, in the 5th form, but stopped after the
> >first half of the 12th instead of taking English until my "Abitur"
> >(final test at the end of the 13th). I had much better marks in
> >Latin (in English my marks were worse than the average) and had to do
> >too much for English (especially reading completely uninteresting books
> >- the worst example was "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, which is
> >so boring that you never should even think about reading it!). So
> >instead I concentrated on Latin: less work, better marks.
> 
> Actually, I read that book in Grade 10... and liked it :)  Horses for 
> courses, I guess.

It may also depend on what a teacher is doing with it. Every second day
"write a concise summary of chapter XX" (where "concise" means two or
three pages) as homework isn't a nice thing to do. I never felt like
doing that, because it was more work than for all other subjects
altogether.

> >[*]: This again reminds me of a certain thing at the IMO 2002. 
> 
> Does this mean "International Math Olympiad"?

Exactly (The second word stands for "Mathematical", but never mind - in
Germany and Korea it's the [i:mo], in the USA and Scotland it's the
[ai em ou]. Now I am exactly one year too old, otherwise I'd find out
how it is called in Japan ["imo" means potato, so I would guess
[ai em ou] like in English-speaking countries]).

-- 
MG>>>> http://####.#####.##/#######/###/##########.exe
FK>>> Was ist "exe"?
RP>> Das, wof$(D??(Br man Wein braucht, weil es sich sonst nicht exekutieren l$(D??(Bsst.
FG> Oder virtuell Ware auf der Maschine.      <20020708183219.GE669@grossing.de>