Although/Despite/In spite of

Hello.

________ a competent person,
William was not recommended to the project member because of his irreverent attitude.

I needed to choose one answer from the selections below.

(1) Despite
(2) Even though he
(3) Although
(4) In spite of

In my opinion, 'a competent person' is a noun phrase so I should choose (1) or (4).
But the ansewer key says, the best answer is (3) Although.

Would you tell me why (3) Although is correct?

Thank you,
Yoko

Hello Katsudon

Are you a teacher? Which college did you graduate from? I'm a Japanese student and learning English in school. My dictionary (Random House E-J) says we can omit in "although" clauses, when the subject is the same as that of the main clause..
(e.g.) Although [he was] a man of the world, he was simple and direct.
(e.g.) Although [he was a competent person], he was not recommended to the project member?
Hope this helps you.

Guest

Dear katsudon,

This sentence was made by me besed on a question of Englishtown.
If possible, please check the site.

Thank you,

Hello Yoko

Could you allow me to put my two cents worth?

Let me take the below as an example sentence.
[EX] Being a Japanese woman, she was quite modest.
Usually we take this as
"As/Since/Because she was a Japanese woman, she was quite modest."

If you want to say:
"Although she was a Japanese woman, she was quite modest",
you have to put the conjunctive "although" to the participle phrase.
[EX] Although (being) a Japanese woman, she was quite modest.
(Please note that "being" here is optional.)

Or you could use some preposition like "despite" or "in spite of"
[EX] Despite being a Japanese woman, she was quite modest.
Please note that in this case you cannot omit "being".
It is because "being a Japanese woman" here is not a participle but a gerund.

paco

Hello Katsudon

Hello Guest.

G: ? I'm a Japanese student and learning English in school. ? {questionable, possibly ungrammatical}

K: One has to be very careful in the deployment of these 'rules' you learn. I'm sure you've learned that you can drop the subject in coordinated clauses, but you can't in your sentence above.

I'm a Japanese student and I'm learning English in school.

==================

G:
My dictionary (Random House E-J) says we can omit in "although" clauses, when the subject is the same as that of the main clause..
(e.g.) Although [he was] a man of the world, he was simple and direct.
(e.g.) Although [he was] a competent person, he was not recommended to the project member?

K: As I've already mentioned, just because a rule allows potentialities for a given construction does NOT mean that every collocation works. If this is a new version of that dictionary, it may have given you solid advice. If it's an older version, I'd recommend that you recycle the paper.

Let me explain this further. You can construct many grammatical sentences; grammatical means that the word order is correct, all the parts of speech are used and yet, as is so often the case in Japan, it is just not English. If you read Japanese translations to English, they are very often unnatural, many times incomprehensible.

There are many reasons for this, but one of the major ones is the overuse and misuse of J-E dictionaries. There's a reason that Japanese speakers all produce the same errors.

Using all the different pronouns, {he/she/we/they/I} I googled the phrase,

"Although (a)competent speaker(s), {subject pronoun}"

and I never even got one hit.

That's why it seemed odd to me. I recognize the grammaticality of something but language is much much more than simply gluing grammatical strings together. I'd say that though this structure is grammatical, and it probably is possible to use it with other word combinations, it is not a natural collocation.

Regarding,

Although competent, ...

Results 1 - 8 of about 11 English pages for "Although competent, he".

Results 1 - 5 of about 8 English pages for "Although competent, she".

Results 1 - 4 of 4 English pages for "Although competent, they".

Results 1 - 9 of about 18 English pages for "Although competent, I".

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