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 How you say in English 2010-04-13 I am an avid reader, although in recent years I have had to shift my intake from novel form to snippets of internet garbage. Reading a novel now holds a particular sense of pleasure for me, but also has made it so that I pay particular attention to the elements of the text. I have had a realization, a point that has been emphasized by the fact that I have lived among non-native English speakers for a very long time. People who have learned English do not (read: never) use the phrase “How you say…” before using an idiom perfectly. “How they say in your country…” / “How your people say…” or any variation is a sign of poor writing because the author does not know how to indicate through written dialogue that the person speaking is not a natural English speaker. Certainly, as an English teacher, I understand the difficulty of idioms in a second language. I have been teaching idioms to students for years and have come to the conclusion that as a general rule, students should not use idiomatic language. This is because of the subtleties often involving culture that go along with an idiom that a non-native have missed out on. A very difficult skill would be to include minor errors of speech to indicate a second language speaker without making it cartoonish. I doubt I could do it well myself unless I was writing a Japanese person, a demographic I have been listening to daily for a decade. The other extreme would be to write in an accent, another style that I think indicates poor writing. add comment to post #269 
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