I'm entering this Karter Contest representing a certain demographic that I feel isn't represented much in the Kart community. You know which one.

It's those of us who drink ice-cold sweet tea, from a drinking glass with the American Flag stars 'n stripes on it. It's those among us who will only do work on Sunday, the Sabbath, if it is absolutely necessary. It's the people who devote Sunday to worship and family. We either go to church on Sunday morning, and those who don't watch John Hagee on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, well... religiously! I stand for people who have the rest of eternity in mind, and not just their time on this Earth, who thank the Lord for everything good in their lives and turn to Him when things aren't as good. I speak for all of those who keep a gun in their home to defend their family and property, and for those who still believe in disciplining children properly-- with a belt or a switch-- and make sure that at an early age they say "Yes ma'am" and "Yes sir", "No ma'am" and "No sir". To say "Please" when they ask somebody to do something for them, and "Thank you" when somebody does something for them.

I represent all of those who highly respect the United States armed forces, if they aren't part of it themselves. I'm here for those who are not afraid to express their social or political opinions through their T-shirts, bumper stickers, or what have you, and those who take pride in voting for their favorite political candidates in November because not everybody in the world has the right to vote or to express their opinions. I also stand for everyone who is proud and thankful to call America home and proudly displays the American flag in front of their home. I stand for the people who want to keep Christ in Christmas, and exercise freedom to deny a marriage license or whatever to a same-sex couple... should they feel as though it conflicts with their personal beliefs. I stand for anybody who wants to bring prayer back into public schools and, failing that, raise their child in a religious private school that will make sure they know how to worship the one person who can give them eternal life.

I stand for the everyday American.

But, in many other ways, I am not an everyday American.

The everyday American may not be able to find nearly every country and territory on a map and identify its capital and flag. The everyday American might not be able to complete a Saturday New York Times crossword... in 10 minutes. Nor has the everyday American probably completed 10,000 New York Times crosswords in six years. Or own more than 100 issues of National Geographic. The typical American doesn't have a Top 40 PAL timesheet on the SMK player's page and Non-NBT site. The average American isn't listening to a German radio station online, playing a song in German, as they write a post on this message board, and probably can't convert Cyrillic, Greek, or Japanese text into our Roman alphabet (and vice versa) or read it out loud. They probably can't tell whether a foreign text is written in Basque, Estonian, Welsh, or Georgian, instead just dismissing it as "some weird foreign language". Or describe the highway-numbering systems of countries as diverse as the UK, Spain, or Thailand. ("You mean they have Interstates in Turkey? Oh, excuse me, otoyol.") The average American probably doesn't watch Jeopardy! every single time it's on, and can't solve 90% of the "bonus round" puzzles on Wheel of Fortune. The average American probably also isn't looking forward to the return of the game show 500 Questions later this month, and doesn't often watch Idiotest or The Chase on the Game Show Network (and probably can't name all five "Chasers" on the UK version of the latter). The average American probably didn't score 165 on an IQ test at age 10, memorize the entire Greek alphabet at that same age, or win their district spelling bee at age 13. The average American kid doesn't get straight 99-percentile scores on standardized tests.

Le plupart des americains ne peuvent pas liser cette phrase. Le plupart des americains peuvent liser et écrire seulement anglais, s'ils sont nés dans les États-Unis. Un americain typique prend un cours d'une langue étrange en lycée (parce qu'il faut), et oublie la langue rapidement. Un americain typique n'écrit pas à leurs amis étranges en français ou une autre langue que n'est pas anglais. Le plupart des gens mondiale peuvent employer deux (ou plus) langues. Mais, le plupart des gens americains (qui sont nés ici) ne peuvent pas. Mais je peux!

I strive to have all the good qualities of a good American citizen, but keep an eye open to the world outside-- even though I have never even left this country-- and try not to be just another "stupid" American.  

A good old boy... with a little bit extra.

Joe I didn't expect somebody to spoil it so soon  

But I thought you'd at least know what lycée and il faut meant...  
(Note: "he does" is il fait.)

Harvey Kartel wrote on 05/14/16 at 22:03:29:


Ah, dang. Similar looking words trip me up a lot. And I have never seen the word lycée before. Typically I use école for all things related to school, but my French isn't nearly as good as yours.  

Harvey Kartel wrote on 05/14/16 at 19:45:55:


I'm a Frenchman born and raised in France and I understand nothing

La plupart des américains ne peuvent pas lire cette phrase. La plupart des américains peuvent lire et écrire seulement l'anglais, s'ils sont nés aux États-Unis. Un américain typique prend un cours d'une langue étrangère au lycée (parce qu'il faut), et oublie la langue rapidement. Un américain typique n'écrit pas à leurs amis étrangers en français ou une autre langue qui n'est pas l'anglais. La plupart des gens au monde peuvent employer deux (ou plus) langues. Mais, la plupart des gens américains (qui sont nés içi) ne peuvent pas. Mais je peux!

Ok it's clear now ^^ and your French is very good


Harvey Kartel wrote on 05/14/16 at 19:45:55:






Harvey Kartel wrote on 05/14/16 at 19:45:55:


Wait U did it??? No BS?

I'm not ok with everything you say/think but it's the reason I like you, so I wish you a merry KC!

Your IQ isnt 165

Chrono Krysster II wrote on 05/14/16 at 23:10:38:


I know it's strange for an English-speaking American to correct a Frenchman's French, but maybe you just mistyped. Do you ever need a cedilla under the c when it's already "soft" (i.e. S sound; preceding e, i, or y)? As far as I know, the cedilla is only used when the c precedes a, o, or u, which would normally give it a "hard" (K) sound. Often this happens when a suffix beginning with a, o, or u is added to a word containing a soft C (e.g. France -> français).

Note that in Sami Çetin's last name, the Ç serves a different role, since it's Turkish; it denotes a "ch" sound, and is considered a separate letter in the Turkish alphabet. (S can also get a cedilla in Turkish, giving it the "sh" sound.)

Lol, this helped me realizing how hard is French for foreigners lol.

Je pense aussi que les Américains mériteraient d'avoir une majuscule étant donné que c'est un nom de peuple

Chrono Krysster II wrote on 05/15/16 at 01:35:28:


dit pas sa ses pas genti de ce moqué

EDIT: Wow I acutally wrote lol twice... lol.

TvK wrote on 05/15/16 at 02:01:35:


Viens boire un petit coup à la maison ! #eoj

Harvey Kartel wrote on 05/14/16 at 19:45:55:

In my experience, this is far from true. Most people in the world will not even bother learning another language in their life, since well... they have no reason to for their daily lives (I took on English myself very early because of video games, that weren't widely translated back then).

For the example of my country, I've seen so many people outright hating to learn English language, deeming it as useless for themselves and too different from French, even though we actually have borrowed a truckload of English words into our vocabulary. And for mediterranean countries (Spain, Italy...) it's even worse.

Even for Canada, for which French is the official second language, the people from there I met in real life didn't know a once of French beyond "Bonjour" and "Au revoir". The french language seems exclusively restricted to Québec in that case.

Donc tu peux être fier de savoir écrire dans une autre langue que la tienne, que nous pouvons comprendre, surtout une langue assez complexe et truffé d'exceptions comme le français. Et moi aussi parfois j'ai quand même besoin de sous-titres pour les "shows" en anglais, certains accents sont incompréhensibles...

Mick wrote on 05/15/16 at 03:57:56:


Mick, this is the entire world we're referring to, not just the parts of North America and Europe that you've visited.  

Taking into consideration places like Africa, India, or Indonesia (as I've said in another thread, places that Western media cares little about, but which have a surprisingly huge chunk of the world's populaiton) it becomes understandable that over half of the world's population speaks a second language. I mentioned Africa earlier. In India, where there are over 20 national official languages, anybody whose native language isn't already Hindi (which is the majority of Indians) has to know Hindi, since it's the de facto lingua franca* of India, and English is highly important in India's job market, as well as being another of India's nationally official languages.

In Indonesia, over 1,000 languages are spoken, no doubt due to the geographically fragmented nature of this country. Bahasa Indonesia is the official language of the country, but most Indonesians aren't native speakers, so... guess what?

Let's not forget about all the people in former Soviet Republics who had to know Russian in addition to their Republic's language. I don't know how much prestige Russian still has in the former USSR outside of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, due to it practically being forced upon them by Russia during Soviet times, but I imagine that any ex-Soviet Republic native over the age of 30 or so can speak Russian, and may still use it to communicate with residents of other SSRs. (that's a useful "word" to know in crossword puzzles) Younger citizens may prefer to learn English, but Russian is probably still taught in schools from Estonia to Krygyzstan because historically it's been an important language to unify this 9-million-square-mile region of the world.

Mick have you travelled all over your own country? In France itself, as I mentioned earlier, there are regions where the first language of many is Breton, Catalan, Basque, Alsatian, Corsican, or Occitan. Since they all have to know French, any native speaker of one of those languages is by definition multilingual, in addition to people like you who are native French speakers capable of using English.

In Spain, speakers of Catalan, Basque, Galician, Asturian, Leonese, and Aragonese make up 20% of the country's population; because Castilian Spanish is the only nationwide standard, this fifth of Spaniards must know at least two languages-- Castilian and their regional language. That, and any Spaniard who has learned English, French, German, or another major European language. I'm sure there are quite a few of those-- considering Spain's location in Europe, and the number of British and German tourists the country no doubt gets, I would imagine that these three languages, and possibly Italian or even Latin, are very widely taught in the high schools across Spain.

Italy's pretty linguistically diverse as well. German, Piedmontese, Genoese, Venetian, Friulian, Sicilian, and Sardinian are spoken by sizable numbers, but standard Italian is taught to all of them, as Italy has no other national official language. And as usual, plenty of Italian-speaking Italians are happy to pursue English, German, or French in their high school education, because of how useful these languages are for communicating with the rest of Europe and the world.

Let's also give some thought to the Welsh and Scottish speakers in the UK, or the Irish speakers in Ireland. Frisian speakers in the Netherlands and Germany, Sorbian speakers in eastern Germany, and speakers of any other language in Europe that isn't official at the federal level, whether it's Romansch in Switzerland, Silesian in Poland, Hungarian in Romania/Slovakia/Austria, Sami in upper Scandinavia, or Ruthenian (aka Rusyn) in the Ukraine.

Also, what about China. Over a billion people, and the Chinese language has numerous dialects that are not mutually intelligible. We all know Mandarin is the national standard, but how many Chinese (outside Beijing) are first-language speakers? Cantonese speakers in the south of the country also need to know Mandarin. So do the speakers of Tibetan in Tibet, or the Uyghurs in the Chinese Northwest. I'm guessing hundreds of millions in China can speak two or more languages, because from a speaking standpoint, Cantonese and Mandarian are different languages. They are simply written with the same Chinese characters.

*Speaking of the phrase lingua franca, any guesses on the literal meaning of this Latin phrase? Yep, that's right. Historically French was a very important language to know anywhere, more important than English. Making it a literal lingua franca. English probably didn't become the main world language until America rose as an economic superpower within the last century or so. For much of European history, English was looked down upon as a "peasant's language" and this is why even today, English has taken so many words and phrases from French.

I just bought a new bottle of barbecue sauce today. It's called Saucy Q and it was made in Mobile. On the label it said, "We believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God." Now that's a company that deserves my money. I just hope the sauce is good too.  

Thanks to everyone who nominated me this year!

I just finished listening to this song, by the way. It's more or less a reworking of the Hank Jr. classic "A Country Boy Can Survive". I remember this one from when I was a little kid and relived that magic with the 45 record of the song that I recently bought.



The lyrics are just as relevant now as they were in 1989...