All Comments on 'The Café Pt. 01'

Thank you for a great story, so far!!. I have read and enjoyed both Chapters 1 and 2

However, I am confused by one thing that regrettably detracts from your story.

if Toma and Milka own a café in the UK, they would probably have reasonably good English.

I worked in south central Europe for a decade and the people I dealt with in that area had English as their second language.

Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles and Ukrainians and Moldovans (from former USSR) all spoke better and more grammatical English than the very basic broken English you have given to Milka. Even clerks in small-town hotels in the Carpathian Mountains had better English than Milka.

By the way, given Europe goes all the way east to the Ural Mountains (east of Moscow) in the Russian Federation, the nations from the Baltic (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania) to the mouth of the Danube and the Black Sea (Bulgaria, Romania) are considered to be **Central Europe**, not Eastern Europe. :-)

By the way, if you want to give the story and Milka a Central European flavour, you can describe the flat above the café as having woven rugs, paintings and icons on walls, embroidered pillow cases and sheets and so on.

Thank you for any consideration you can give to this suggestion.

Anon - I do not at all doubt what you write. It is quite appalling how English people on the whole are so poor at other languages when, as you write, so many other people speak English so well.

Very much part of the story are Milka's malapropisms and unusual phrases and they continue to the end (part 5). Indeed one of them is in the penultimate paragraph. Toma's English is near perfect, it is only Milka who is not quite so good. I don't think it unreasonable to have one of the two of them not quite up to colloquial English and I certainly do not mean this as any slur on the quality of English as a second language in Central or Eastern Europe.

I very much like your idea of woven rugs, embroidery, icons etc. I have, perhaps unfortunately, not bothered with such detail to give a real feel to the flat, but I did not specify quite where the two of them originate from in Central or Eastern Europe.

Very happy to discuss further if you email me.

Max

I agree with the anonymous who has travelled in other parts, that Milka would speak better English, but think the author should actually doubt what else is said - I have also travelled in Eastern Europe (Which despite the garbage written, is where Bulgaria and Romania are located), and many people there cannot speak a word of English, never mind have it as a second langauge.............. utter rubbish. The second language of older people would be Russian, French, German (Depending which country they lived in), and of younger people it would depend on whether they lived in a village in which case the second language could easily be Turkish or Rom (gypsy language) if not the first language.

Another thing - are you confusing English people with British ????????

Milka must be a very strange woman, as her use of sexual language is fairly unusual for many women from those parts, in addition to her bad use of English being exactly what a typical Brit thinks she would sound like.................. ''Foreigner English'' does not sound much like the way you have written it, and I have also lived and worked in other parts of Europe, so do have some idea, from years of hearing it first hand and trying to decipher what was actually meant.

All in all the idea was good, but having had personal experience of people from that part of Europe, the depiction was so inaccurate as to take away any credibility.

Poor Toma he cuckolded in own bed, naughty Milka she like cock too much, she a naughty euro nympho. Chris have to return to work with sticky dicky, naughty Chris naughty Milka , poor Toma. What a hoot. See you down the road Max.