My song was Frontpaged again! Thank you, Newgrounds! Thank you, everyone!
As some of you may have noticed, I made this song as an impression of the biographical drama film "First Man". I was really moved. The movie clearly shows the contrast between exciting science and Mr. Armstrong's, his friends' and family's struggles against pressure, loss and fear to be the first man in the world.
Unfortunately, I am not going to be an astronaut, but I still feel like I have learned a lot about how mankind can deal with science and technology by watching this movie.
Incidentally, I am now using a website "DeepL" when writing in English. I don't mean to brag, but I have enough English ability to become an English teacher in junior high school in my country (because I really wanted to understand the ZTV series!), and I have been writing all my sentences on my own. However, the words and phrases suggested by DeepL seem to be much better than my translations....
I am very curious about how this text will look to you.
CoconutHead221
The song is great, you deserve it! Your English looks very good overall, but there are a few minor things that I think can be improved. Since you've been formally taught English you may understand a few of those little "gotchas" that English is full of, but as a native speaker myself there are a few things that caught my eye in your writing. In your first sentence "My song is frontpaged again!", the "-ed" in "frontpaged" implies past tense, yet "is" is present tense, creating a bit of a contradiction. That's an acceptable thing to flub in casual conversation, but your formal language makes it stand out. Another note regarding your writing is your tone, and it's flip-flopping between formal and casual. You largely rejected using contractions which made your writing sound formal and stiff. If this was academic writing or a business letter that would be fine, but your use of phrases like "by the way" and things like exclamation marks come off as very casual. I assume you want a casual and friendly tone, so I recommend using more contractions in your writing. But to reiterate, you've been formally educated in English so you may have a more precise understanding of some of it's quirks that I do. Everything I've said is just little nitpicks, your writing was still very good! Keep up the good work.
Precipitation24
Thank you!!
I am (still) trying to write natural English, so your advice is very helpful.
I am impressed you noticed that there are almost no contractions in my sentences. At school in my country, I was trained to academic writing, and one of the things I was taught was not to use contractions in English composition. This culture is still ingrained in me today.
Also, thank you for the valuable information about "by the way". I was very surprised because this is an expression which Japanese people are very familiar with and I often see it in business English textbooks. As an English learner who wants to write formal sentences, I would like to use a different formal way of saying "by the way". For example, "incidentally" seems to be a good one, but oddly enough, since Dr. Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs used it ("Incidentally, did you read...."), I thought it was a word that older men use for young ladies....I have to study more.
Also, tense is the first part of learning English so I am embarrassed that I still make many mistakes in tenses. Due to the fear of such mistakes, I still cannot handle the present prefect and past perfect tenses.