The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Trolling?
I'm skeptical that someone with poor English really enjoys reading slatestarcodex and posting on the Motte in their free time. Nothing to do with your station in life, its the English that is a red flag.
Edit: actual advice, as a non American who didn't pull himself up by the bootstraps in America. So that everything I say with a grain of salt. But I do have a lot of relatives living in the US and Canada so I have what I think is a decent second hand idea about immigrating and starting a life in the US.
If you are on the process of getting Asylum, that is actually quite a big hurdle done with. Because whatever situation you are in now, it's better than that situation + having the sword of deportation hanging over your head. At least you can be poor, In America.
To be honest, its going to be quite difficult for you to "get your life together" on a menial job. The only option that satisfies all your constraints are that you become so good at your menial job that you get promoted to a manager or sorts, but you say that is not likely. Perhaps switch to a menial job where that is likely? Managing a fast food restaurant is the first one that comes to mind. (I'm aware this is easier said than done on a work visa)
Can you share more details on where you are from? What limitations your work permit has, etc.
Idk, it seems intuitively true to me that reading it or understanding it and being able to reproduce it are vastly different skills. In other languages I can understand more than I can reply; and even in English I can read Hemingway and understand how beautiful the writing is without being able to reproduce the same style in a new topic beyond the level of a 12th grade AP English assignment.
Though I guess maybe this is just a more esoteric troll than I am used to.
More options
Context Copy link
FWIW some non native speakers can understand and read and sometimes even write English perfectly without being able to speak it well. My master's degree, which I did somewhere in Europe, was in English and got a lot of international students and I've been surprised by this phenomenon a couple of times.
I remember meeting a Ukrainian guy in my program who really struggled having even a basic conversation in English when I first met him, the pronunciation and the grammar were absolutely atrocious, I figured he was going to fail the courses and wondered how he had been allowed in with such poor English. When I was trying to help him with some stuff we communicated a bit via email and to my surprise his emails were written in flawless English. He never struggled writing papers in English and got his degree without any problems (and by the end of it his conversational English was much much better).
Another example from this time was an Indian guy who I could speak with in English without any problems, but he kept making weird grammatical mistakes, both in speaking and in writing. Despite his seeming lack of English skills, he could understand complicated English in an academic context without any problems. There were some issues with poor grammar when writing papers, but again, he got his degree without too much problems.
More options
Context Copy link
I been a lurker for years (a little before the first exodus)
I think reading English is different than writing it. I can understand passive things like reading and hearing it, but knowing how to build a sentence or how to pronounce a word, are things I have problem doing. I didn't learn English in a formal setting like a school but mostly in the internet and living in Florida.
Your English is actually quite decent, there are many native speakers who write worse than you. Some of them significantly worse. You could 100% pass for a native speaker online if you didn't mention that you're not.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link