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Notes from my amazing journey through the English language

Fernando De Freitas
4 min readJul 4, 2021

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A compilation of idioms, phrases, words and whatnot I’ve picked up so far.

Photo by Jordan Madrid on Unsplash

English is not my mother tongue, and even though I’ve been listening to music, watching TV shows, movies, reading books and generally consuming all kinds of content in english since I’ve been around 7 years old.

I still remember a doodle I made of The Mask saying “Ssssssmonkey” in my 2nd grade math notebook; it took me around 4 more years to learn it was actually “Ssssssmokin”. In all fairness I was a 7–8 year old kid, watching CBS with no subtitles from essentially a bootleg cable box.

And even after moving to the UK as an adult, and having lived here for more than 5 years now, I’m still learning new words, phrases and idioms every day. And I’m loving it, learning a new one is usually one of the highlights of my days.

Another passion I’ve developed alongside this is disproving things (pieces of clothing, food, sports, etc) we Venezuelans grew up thinking were originally ours, like Bolas Criollas, which is actually a modified version of Bocce Ball. That’s probably for another day (and post) but, spoiler: Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy…

Now, let’s look at the most interesting ones I’ve learnt so far, when available I’ll provide 1:1 mapping to Venezuelan Spanish…

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Fernando De Freitas
Fernando De Freitas

Written by Fernando De Freitas

Principal Software Engineer and Engineering Manager. Specialty Coffee Enthusiast. I write about software development, management and other stuff occasionally.

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