116 Comments on "FOR ENGRISH AFICIONADOS"


  5. I like the English one because I call myself an English major. A French one would be useful as well:

    “Francais n’est pas mon langue maternelle”


  11. I keep meaning to make things like that, but with the funny furrin versions being incredibly rude.


  15. There’s no way that the Ã…rabic one is correct. I can’t vouch for all of them, but the Spanish, Russian, and Nederlandian (?) ones seem at least vaguely correct.

    The Arabic should be the shortest of them all, not the longest.

    But I concur that these are awesome.


  17. I would pay good money for any of these!

    The problem is, I like the idea of the non-english languages, but which one?? I think a shirt that changes to a different translation every time you wear it needs to be designed. Maybe hypercolor t-shirts will work?


  19. also: i really like the colors on the chinese shirt, but i would be happy with any one of them. great idea.


  20. shouldn’t the spanish one have an upside-down bang at the beginning? I would wear any of these, BTW


  21. Hey, my brother is an Arabic teacher at university level. I can ask him to get a respectable translation for you towards the end of the day if you still need it by then.


  22. @Grant: it’s “Francais n’est pas ma langue maternelle”

    I want all but the Dutch one.


  25. !

    I would definitely buy one! Probably the Japanese one.

    Also, someone else already pointed this out, and maybe it’s on purpose, but proper Russian would read

    “Русский не мой родной язык.”


  26. لَيْسَتْ اَلْعَرَبِيّْ لُغَتِي


  27. Actually, what you want is:

    لَيْسَ اَلْعَرَبِي لُغَتِي اَلْأُمِي


  28. I would totally buy the Chinese one- but I like the colors of the English or Russian shirts. However you do it- Awesome!


  30. The Chinese one is kind of wrong. No one in China would call Chinese “Han Yu”. You’d be much more likely to hear it as “Zhong Wen”中文　or “Zhong Guo Hua” 中国话


  31. Oh and “language” in that case should probably be rendered as “Yu Yan” 语言


  34. The Russian shirt should read “Русский нет моево родново языка”, I think. “Russian (nominative case) is not (“нет” is the negative copula, “не” is the negative prefix) my native language (genitive case, because direct objects are genitive in negated sentences)”. One thing that might be weird is that “Русский” is an adjective, not a noun, as far as I know. There are nouns that look like adjectives though. I studied Russian in college, but I’m not Russian, so a native speaker would know better what to do here.


  35. Neat. Needs more non-Indo-European languages however IMO. Finnish for example: “Suomi ei ole äidinkieleni”


  36. Which part of that Arabic is which? Or how does it break down regarding the above the clouds, next to the clouds, below the clouds clusters?


  40. The arabic runs right-to-left, and the literal gloss is:

    not the_arabic language maternal

    Good luck with the clouds.


  41. In case it wasn’t clear, I’m typing the English gloss left to right. The word ‘not’ is the logical first word of Arabic, which will appear in your browser (and should appear on the shirts) in the rightmost position.


  42. How about Lithuanian ?

    Lietuviu kalba. Nera mano gimtoji kalba.

    I’d buy some of the others as well…


  45. Not to be a jerk – I grew up speaking Russian, and Bowen got confused with the use of the negative up there. (“Русский нет моево родново языка” is something like “Russian… my native tongue doesn’t exist”.) “Русский не мой родной язык” is way better.


  47. if you ever print the russian tee, color scheme and all.. grammatical mistakes not included.. i’d love to buy one!


  48. I would totaly buy the russian and chinese ones. minor gramatical mistakes are ok. its a shirt declaring that i am not a native speaker so a foreign mistake is ok.


  49. Hello. I’m only a learner of Japanese at the moment, so take my words with a grain of salt, and please, completely disregard them if your Japanese translation comes from someone who actually knows Japanese. Anyway, two things regarding the Japanese shirt, first of all, while I do believe 自国語 works here, I think it sounds a bit awkward, especially preceded by 私の. I would think the best choice would be to preserve 私の and use 母語 in place of 自国語. Also, if I am correct and you were trying to use the formal じゃない (or, moreover, the negative of である) when you wrote 「でない」, let me point out that it should be, if I’m correct, 「ではない」. Yes, it makes no sense, but languages tend to do that. So, this would turn out as 「日本語！は私の母語ではない！」. However, as I said in the beginning, take my words with a grain of salt. In fact, you may be better off taking a whole salt shaker. Anyway, just keep in mind that I’m but a student and that any Japanese speaking contact you have more than likely knows Japanese much, much better than I do.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *