#efl

i wish i had the time to write out the full meta on this that lives in my brain but the short version is this: his english is really fucking good

i have been an EFL teacher for 20 years and he's better than 98% of the people i've taught. Don't be distracted by the occasional missed article or word he needs to double-check in the dictionary, this boy has been dropping advanced grammar like it's nothing from the very beginning.

the very first thing he says to shane,"You will not be so nice when we beat you," is grammatically perfect and contains:

a modal verb indicating the future (will)

correct negation and base verb form (not be)

an adverb of degree modifying an adjective (so nice)

a relative pronoun introducing a defining relative clause (when)

an idiomatic use of the verb 'beat'

and this is when he'd barely spent any time among english speakers! By the time he's been with boston for a few seasons, his english is genuinely outstanding, easy and fluent and grammatically complex. Yes, there will always be some things he doesn't know and yes there will be times when he struggles with it (stress, exhaustion, frustration, all of these are factors in the ability to produce a second language) but when you're writing his dialogue here are some vital points to remember:

ilya himself is a very unreliable narrator when it comes to his english abilities. He canonically hates his accent and sees its existence as a personal failing. He has insanely high expectations for what he should be able to do in english but feels he can't. This is, and i cannot emphasise this too strongly, *very normal* for high-level language learners. The more you learn the more you realise you don't know, and the more you try to express complex ideas and run up against your own roadblocks the more frustrated you can become. People are genuinely very bad at assessing their own foreign language ability and ilya is no exception.

the show itself tells us repeatedly that ilya's english sucks even when it very clearly does not. Shane's comments about it rolling off his tongue and asking him if he used google translate have zero basis in reality. The show tells us he's bad while showing us he's good, believe what you're shown.

i'm gonna bet that neither rachel reid nor jacob tierney has any practical experience with english second language learners that could guide them in making ilya's english more authentic to the standard learner experience. This is fine, since his language ability is in no way the point of the show but it does mean that the disconnect between what's told and what's shown isn't intentional. Which means that fic writers absolutely could choose to ignore what's shown and write ilya as having more difficulties with english than we witness him having. But! If you do this, please, please do it with intent. Do some research on what russian speakers actually struggle with in english*. Don't just have him leave off every single article and call it a day. And if you are a native english speaker who speaks zero other languages, check your prejudices and actually listen to what he says and how he says it before you start typing.

seriously. This fandom has so many good fics already, like genuinely outstanding ones, but i can count on the fingers of one hand the ones i've read that represent ilya's english accurately to how it's portrayed in the show. Let's do better.

❓The comma is used every day, all the time, by everyone. But who’s actually using it correctly?

📌 Let’s stop guessing. Here is a list of when and how to use a comma: