Search results for 'tag:Genders tag:Prepositions' matching tags 'Genders' and 'Prepositions'

Mistakes made by Chinese Learners

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:30:26 GMT

Hi everyone

I just wondered if anyone could help - I have to write a profile of a chinese learner of English (completely made up). In it I must put any difficulties that the learner has in learning English as an L2. I have got so far:

Intonation transfer from L1 may cause them to be perceived as rude/inconsiderate, more serious transfer may affect comprehensiveness.
No inflections in L1 - tenses difficult to learn in L2 as L1 has no true tenses and concept of time is expressed by adverbs/implicit or contextual assumptions.
Difficulty distinguishing [r] & - Does anyone know why this is as I can't find a reason?!!
Prepositions such as 'on', 'in' & 'at' have one chinese translation in many contexts, 'zai' - may be confused resulting in phrases such as 'on Taiwan' instead of 'in Taiwan'.
Use of awkward gerunds e.g. 'no noising', excessive use of verbs ending in 'ing' e.g. 'do not climbing', confusion of 'ed' & 'ing' verbs e.g. 'i am bored' vs 'i am boring' --- all of these errors occur because verbs are not conjugated in chinese, for tense or pronoun.
No equivalent word for 'the' so may be used excessively when not needed e.g. 'The China' or missed out when needed. May also be confused with 'a'/'an'.
Confusion over countable and uncountable nouns, use of 'how much?' vs 'how many?' - leads to phrases such as 'I want a soup' & 'a lot of shoe'. This is due to there not being plurals in chinese - no inflections.

Switching between 'he' & 'she' - Does anyone know why this is?

If anyone can think of anymore it would be greatly appreciated or if anyone knows the answers to my questions about gender switching and distinguishing [r] & this would also help a lot!!

Thank you in advance.

Shannon

Re: About the meaning of "where"

Velimir — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 08:56:07 GMT

Hello again,

Unfortunately,I've put one part in my previous post wrongly.Sorry for that.It would be correct to use the preposition "toward" in the following part:

"But,if the verb indicates motion,or in plain english,if you are :going toward, flying toward, traveling toward.."

What I've stated after that would be true now,i.e the following noun will be in the dative case.But,if the stress is on the final destination of flying,traveling,going..then the following noun will be in the accusative case,necessarily preceded with the preposition "to".(the preposition "to" perfectly match serbian "za",as attendant to the verbs of motion).
Although the case of a noun is influenced by the verb,modifying adjective(and its case),number(and its case)and gender of that noun,the case of the noun is most heavily influenced by the preceding preposition,if it is present.If the noun is not preceded with a preposition then other factors will determine the case of the noun.The importance of the preposition is apparent in the following example:

I arrived in London. - the noun "London" is in the accusative case

I arrived from London. - the noun "London" is in the genitive case

I suppose that it would require serious contemplation to explain all aspects of the "case" in any language,and additional comparison with english would make it really painful.

Best regards

quite interesting

Inchoateknowledge — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 12:10:11 GMT

"It is not easy to have a rational discussion with people about the nature of their language.
They feel that the language belongs to them, and they are therefore entitled to hold cut and dried opinions about it.
And when opinions differ, emotions runs high. Arguments can easily stem from minor points of usage as from major educational policies.
In English, the origin of many popular misconceptionslies lies in the work of the linguists of the eighteenth century who first attempted to codify the English grammar. Unfortunatelly, they worked on the premise that English grammar is derived from Latin grammar and that the rules of the latter necessarily determine the former. It was this fundamental misunderstanding that resulted in the absurd but 'time-honoured' never-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition' type of rules that many people still cling to. These days, many people complain that the Internet is the source of much unforgivable distortion of English, and that the ease and speed of email communication engenders a lazy approach to writing. This is possibly a short-sighted view: perhaps we should be more broad-minded and view such changes as potential enrichment rather than corruption of the language. Perhaps those who argue it is only the latter are guilty of stick-in-the-mud mentality which is often not confined to their own language. The American linguist Leonard Bloomfield tells the story of a doctor who was quite firm in his view that the American lanuage Chippewa had only a few hundred words. When Bloomsfield attempted to dispute the point, the doctor had no thoughts of backing down. He simply turned away and refused to listen."

Study guide.

Matrix4583 — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 02:03:02 GMT

Hey, i'm new here. My name is Tim and I got this forum from a friend of mine. He told me that this might help me with the problem i got. I have a brother that is 16 years old and i'm 23( in the US Army). He needs help with his english. The teacher gave him the study guide, but no answer on it. So i ask him to give the study guide to me and i'll help him with it. Well, since i'm busy soo much on school and my job, it's impossible for me to do this. I was wondering if you have some time and help me with this problem. I really appreciate it. Here's the problem.

Language Art:

A. apostrophe
B. Synonym
C. noun or pronoun
D. quotations mark
E. Adjective
F. verb or verb phrase
G. abbreviation
H. antonyms
I. root word.
J. proper nouns
K. Verb
L. action and linking
M. gerund
N. adverb
O. gender
P. subject
Q. Nomniative, object and possessive
R. Predicate nominative
S. Present, past and future
T. direct object.
U. prepositions
V. appositive
W. Object of a preposition

1.____ The subject of a sentence may be what part of speech?
2.____ States what the subject does, is or has in a sentence.
3.____ Sometimes called the simple predicate
4.____ The main part of a without any affixes.
5.____ Two kinds of a Verb.
6.____ What moddifies noun or pronoun?
7.____ What follow a linking verb or action verb?
8.____ The simple tense of verb.
9.____ Follow a preposition.
10.____ Tells more about another noun.
11.____ Answer "what?" or "whom?"
12.____ who or what the sentences about.
13.____ The three cases of personal pronoun.
14.____ personal pronoun have number, person and what?
15.____ Usually modifies a verb, but can sometimes modify an adjective.
16.____ show relationship between it's object and some other word in a sentence.
17.____ A participle that end in "ing" and functions as a noun.
18.____ needed to form possessive nouns and contractions.
19.____ Capitalized because they are particular person, places, and things.
20.____ A short way of writing a word consisting of some of the letters in the word followed by a period.
21.____ Used to show where the exact word of a speaker begin and end.
22.____ Opposite meaning.
23.____ A word that is similar to another in meaning.

That's it. Hoooha.

Study guide.

Matrix4583 — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 22:08:35 GMT

Re: The Original Ten

paco2004 — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 22:56:09 GMT

Historic Lughnasadh
Lughnasadh is a harvest celebration named for Lugh (Irish), Llew (Welsh), Lug (Britonic),or Lugus, the Celtic sun god. Lugh was one of the most popular of the Celtic gods. He gave his name to many towns around Europe including Lugdunum (Lyons) and perhaps even Londinium (London).

down
Etymology online
O.E. dun "hill," from Celtic word for "hill, citadel" (cf. O.Ir. dun "hill, hill fort," and second element in place names London, Verdun, etc.), from PIE base *dheue- "to close, finish, come full circle" (cf. O.E. dun "hill," M.Du. dune "sandy hill"). Meaning "elevated rolling grassland" is from 1297.

OED
Forms: 1 dÃºn, 2â4 dun, 4â5 doun(e, 4â7 downe, 4â down. [OE. dÃºn fem., hill = ODu. dÃºna (MDu. dÃºne, Du. duin, whence mod.LG. dÃ¼ne sandhill, F. dune). Supposed to be of Celtic origin: cf. OIr. dÃºn hill, hill-fort, Welsh din, and place-names in -dunum.
Since dÃºna must have been in use at an early date in the West Germanic dialects of Batavia and Lower Saxony, it is doubtful whether the word was brought by the Saxons from the continent, or adopted, after their settlement here, from the Britons; the former alternative is favoured by the exact correspondence in form and gender of the OE. and ODu. words, and by the fact that in local nomenclature OE. dÃºn seems to have been confined to the Saxon area. It is, however, in English only that the word has given rise to an adverb and a preposition]

paco

Re: How to improve my grammar skills?

bratannia — Mon, 03 May 2004 20:23:35 GMT

It does help a lot if you have a good grammar book, one that really gives you all the rules but with plenty of interesting examples and illustrations. I'm not an English teacher so I don't know the title of such a book for English studies; maybe one of the other readers does. If you are involved in writing or reading in a relatively complex technical field in English, there is a good online site at http://www.cs.wcu.edu/res/nasa_sp7084/sp7084cont.html

It explains things like 'sentence parallelism' that many second-language English learners never get to know about. But even though you're an advanced student, you may find it too complex, and there will certainly also be less complex versions of the good, interesting grammar book or website around.

Grammar, like everything, is best studied as a thing of beauty; some people automatically respond to the beauty of logic, while others find this difficult. Of course, most grammars contain elements that are illogical, but then, these crazy aspects can often be rather entertaining. Why, in Dutch, should a girl (meid) be feminine while a young girl (meisje) is neuter in gender? Why, in Cantonese, should dogs and bowls be counted with the same counting word, jek? (The reason is perhaps that 3000 years ago in south China, bowls were mostly made with legs, making them easy to compare with animals -- there is often some interesting history in the nonsensical parts of grammar.) Why, 500 years ago in English, could you say the very simple "I know not why," whereas now, to say the same thing, you would need to say the more complicated and less logical "I do not know why?" The whole process by which languages change over time is very mysterious and interesting.

Here's another encouraging thought. The zou in your username looks Chinese. When I was studying Cantonese my Chinese friends in Canada all said, "no, don't study Cantonese, it's too difficult, you should study Putonghua (Mandarin) instead. The grammar is just like English!"

It's not entirely true, but there's a grain of truth in it. Both languages are very simple and efficient and lack many of the grammatical frills and decorations found in other languages, like noun gender and case endings. To get the first 50% of the way to perfection in English grammar, you just need to remember that nouns are singular or plural, verbs have tenses according to time and continuation, and the time-word usually comes at the end of the phrase, thus "The two boys went to school yesterday," not the gloriously efficient Chinese (or at least Cantonese) "Those two-count boy yesterday go school."

Finally, it's important to distinguish between grammar and style, though you eventually need to learn both. The grammar of your query was quite good. Strictly speaking, there may not be a real grammatical error in it. The style, though, showed that a bit more study would be beneficial. One of the most difficult things about learning most languages of European origin is learning to match prepositions (like in, at, by) with the words they are commonly paired with. This often takes years. In the meantime, though, everyone understands you even though you make a few errors, so you do not need to be shy about talking to people. Just to pick examples out of your query, the word 'reluctant' usually goes with 'to,' while the word 'suggestions' usually partners with 'on,' 'about' or 'for,' depending on the situation. In your query, you could easily change 'suggestions to learn' to the more fluent-sounding 'suggestions on how to learn.' You wouldn't be able to use the normal 'reluctant to,' though, because it would change the meaning of your first sentence slightly, making you sound as if you were telling us that had never studied English grammar at all. You would be forced to say something like,

Firstly, I should admit that I'm an advanced English learner, but I'm actually quite reluctant when it comes to studying English grammar.

Now, that's informal spoken English. For formal writing you would be better off using "reluctantly" or "with reluctance," as in

"Firstly, I should admit that even though I'm an advanced English student, I actually study English Grammar only reluctantly"... or, "only with the greatest reluctance."

Phrases like "reluctant when it comes to," "only reluctantly" and "only with the greatest reluctance" are so-called 'stock phrases,' almost like cliches, but they are widely used, and they are certainly not taught in any grammar book. The only way to learn all these things and develop a fluent-sounding English style is through doing as much English reading, conversing and movie-watching as possible. In the process, you usually also "get the feel" of the grammar and it becomes much easier.

Re: English is a crazy language

pemmican — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 02:54:21 GMT

Deepa, I totally agree with you!

As examples always enlighten a lot, I'll give you some impressions of my mother tongue German:
I have to say that English in many cases is simpler than my native language. You mentioned e.g. the gender of a noun which is usually expressed by the article. In English, there are no genders, everything is "the", while in German you have three genders: der (masculine), die (feminine), das (neuter). With human beings, the grammatical gender usually agrees in the natural gender as 'the man' is 'der Mann', the woman is die Frau and the child, when you don't know whether it is a boy or a girl is das Kind. But - already here you have exceptions as e.g. the word for "girl" is neuter: das MÃ¤dchen even if it's obvious that a girl is female!

According to the gender, also the adjectives have to be inflected:
a good man is in German ein guter Mann
a good woman is eine gute Frau
and a good child is ein gutes Kind.

For all the "simple" nouns you have to learn their genders by heart as there is no rule to cling to when you need to know the noun's gender. If you have a compound word, i.e. a noun that consists of two or more own nouns, e.g. buttercup or sunshine, the word takes over the gender of the last noun -> sun is Sonne in German, feminine: die Sonne, Schein is masculine: der Schein, so sunshine is masculine, too: der Sonnenschein.

Speaking of compound words, German has an incredible ability to form new words out of already existing words. Unlike English, that takes over Latin terms to get new words, e.g. accept, surprise, German forms them this way: accept = annehmen from nehmen =take and an = on => take on; surprise = Ã¼berraschen from Ã¼ber = over and rasch =quick => overquick, etc.
Compound words can be put together out of many single words - they are written as one word then, e.g. "DampfschiffahrtskapitÃ¤nsuniformfarbe" which means "colour of the uniform of a captain of a steamboat". Farbe = colour here is the last word and has the feminine gender, so the whole compound term is feminine: "Die DampfschiffahrtskapitÃ¤nsuniformfarbe".

English, with some very few old exceptions, usually adds an -s to the noun and you have its plural form: dog-dogs, car-cars, tree-trees.
German nouns form their plural in different ways:
adding -(e)n: Frau-Frauen (woman)
adding -s: Auto-Autos (car)
adding -e: Brot-Brote (bread)
adding nothing: Teller-Teller (plate)
umlauting the stem vowel: Vater-VÃ¤ter (father)
umlauting the stem vowel and adding -er: Haus-HÃ¤user (house)
umlauting the stem vowel and adding -e: Sohn-SÃ¶hne (son)
...

Also the cases in German still have their own forms, that means instead of forming a case by taking a preposition and keeping the noun in its actual form, German nouns add endings and in addition, the article changes as well:

------------------------Singular-------Plural
Nominative case --- das Haus-------die HÃ¤user------------the house------the houses
Genitive case--------des Hauses----der HÃ¤user------------of the house---of the houses
Dative case----------dem Haus(e)--den HÃ¤usern-----------to the house---to the houses
Accusative case-----das Haus-------die HÃ¤user-------------the house------the houses

(this is only one paradigm though - other nouns follow a different pattern)

Verbs in German still keep inflecting endings for all the persons, also in past tense, sometimes an umlaut occurs in 2nd and 3rd person singular, eg: tragen (to carry)

Present--------------Past
ich trage-------------ich trug-----------I carry------------I carried
du trÃ¤gst-------------du trugst---------you carry---------you carried
er trÃ¤gt--------------er trug------------he carries---------he carried
wir tragen-----------wir trugen--------we carry----------we carried
ihr tragt-------------ihr trugt-----------you carry---------you carried
sie tragen-----------sie trugen---------they carry--------they carried

As you can see here, there are also two different forms of "you": du and ihr. You have to differenciate between whom you're adressing: If it's only one person, you use 'du', if it's 2 or more people you use 'ihr' - and additionally: If you want to address one or more person who you don't know very well, you have to use the polite form "Sie" - so all in all there are 3 pronouns for English "you".
Of course, also these pronouns have different forms when they are used in the four cases.

Ok, I'll leave it with this now - I don't wanna type a whole Grammar here *hehe*
I hope you can now see that in many parts, Grammar English is a lot easier than in other languages. BUT on the other hand I have to say that there are also things that are easier in German - tenses for example. German e.g. doesn't have progressive tenses and it's also not necessary to use future tense when referring to future happenings, usually everyone uses the present tense instead...

But *blahblah* - I hope this info might have helped you a bit. Comparing languges to each other often opens doors, you haven't seen before and it's usually very helpful to have a closer look also at Grammar of your native language when learning a foreign language.

Review of The Grouchy Grammarian by Thomas Parrish

John C. — Sat, 29 Nov 2003 08:55:41 GMT

This book looked promising â it was subtitled A How-Not-To Guide to the 47 Most Common Mistakes in English Made by Journalists, Broadcasters, and Others Who Should Know Better â and in the first few pages I came across a passage referring to that group:

What did these people study in high school and college? Headline writing? Advertising techniques? No English, no history? Have they never loved words and ideas, the way a carpenter loves wood or a chef loves herbs? Didn't they want to know subjects and verbs, adverbs and prepositions, as the carpenter knows nails and sandpaper and hot glue? Have they never taken a sentence apart to see what made it run?

Good stuff. He had me very much on his side right at the start.

However, I wasn't much further into the book before I realised it was actually full of unsupported assertions that even a beginning grammarian like me could see were dubious.

Pettiness arises early in the piece. The author takes exception to a Hong Kong jeweller being quoted by a journalist as saying that, "he had dreamed all his life to have enough money to â¦". Of course the "to have" should be "of having", but what's his point? That people who live in Hong Kong don't always speak perfect English? Some news flash. Or perhaps he feels that journalists ought to rework direct quotes to improve the grammar â thereby having their interviewees speaking better than they actually did. Few native English speakers would utter a sentence like that, and certainly none who would be in the target audience for the book.

Even when he's making a valid and important point, instead of giving a few representative examples, he hammers away with case after case after case until the reader becomes exasperated: "Yes, yes! I get it, for heaven's sake â move on!"

For instance, subject-verb agreement, an easy point to demonstrate, is given fourteen examples, before he writes, "At this point, I felt I had probably chosen enough examples of subject-verb disagreement to make the point clear." But then, at the urging of the grumpy grammarian, he goes on to cite another twenty-two (!) examples that add nothing whatever to the argument. This kind of spoon-feeding is counter-productive. The informed reader has long since become bored, and the novice is misled into believing there's something diabolically subtle about the concept.

Two important issues were mishandled: Firstly, the difference between may and might, and secondly, the lie/lay problem. In both instances I finished the chapter a bit less clear in my own mind than at the start, although the issues are not actually that hard to explain. A few minutes browsing much shorter passages in my other reference works restored my clarity.

Then there were the places where the author had pointed out a common mistake, and pretended to be astonished that people could be so idiotic as to make it, when the error was in fact quite understandable. For instance, he gets all bent out of shape about people using lead instead of led as the past tense of lead, when it's obvious that people are unconsciously working on the analogy of read/read. English is tricky; sometimes you engender more goodwill by acknowledging that fact instead of battering people around the head for trivial slips.

The book lacks an underlying philosophy. Sometimes the author strains to be liberal, but at other times he's pedantic on minor points; the overall impression is of a grab-bag of personal prejudices rather than a coherent view of English usage.

Another problem I had was with the presentation. The device he uses is that he has a friend (the grouchy grammarian of the title), whose clippings he mines for examples of egregious errors. But the method quickly becomes tiresome and artificial, and the grouch is poorly characterised â he's pretty much an empty clichÃ© of a grump (e.g. he says "humph!" a lot). At no time was I able to believe or pretend that the grouchy grammarian was anyone other than the author.

The last problem I have with the book, and I admit that this may be specific to me, is that there's a great deal of sports talk â mostly about baseball and American football. The author is clearly a fan of these two sports, so many of the solecisms he cites are from TV or newspaper sports commentators. For this non-American, non-sporting reader, that made much of the content foggy and incomprehensible.

To be fair, there is much of interest, and even a few gems, in the book, but if you purport to write about correctness in language then you have make sure that everything you write is actually correct. I don't mind people putting forward suggestions or opinions about usage, but when these are clearly debatable, yet presented as incontrovertible facts, the integrity of the whole enterprise is thrown into doubt.

Fortunately, I got this book out of the library; I would have been very disappointed if I had paid good money for it. I'll photocopy a few pages when I take it back, but I won't be sorry to drop it in the returns slot after that.