Re: Apples or pears?

julielai — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 14:37:27 GMT

My cyber red packet for the new year!

If you're investigating semantic analogy, I suggest you look at my other thread on "approach to". I've been trying to tell my friend it's okay to put a gerund (or is it verbal, as Mr. P called it?) after "approach to". My friend insisted that "X is the wrong approach to learn English" is better, because "X is the wrong way to learn English" is correct. And wherever "way" is acceptable, "approach" should be as well.

This little experiment reminds us all how the nature and meaning of words often overrides possible similarities in grammatical structures. (as in the example of my friend) So, I should thank YOU, since, as the Chinese say, "you have put money (ie. knowledge/power) in my pocket", no wordplay intended!

Poor Mr. P. must have had an unfortunate encounter with Men in Black, except these MIB forgot their neuralizers, so they operated on him.

Re: Jeff Corwin Experience

troy — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 18:08:53 GMT

Haa..haaa...shows that how difficult for me to learn English. When I speak in mother tongue, I never think which one is 'noun' or which one is 'adjective', the thing is, I don't really have that kind of environment to get me accustomed to using English, I try to read more, but to learn through reading is somehow different from learning directly through interaction and conversation, because normally reading will put me at the receiving end and thus make the foundation a bit shaky, and questions will start to arise when I want to write something, should I use this or that word, should I phrase it this way or otherwise. To put an analogy, if you stay in Sydney and go surfing at Bondi beach everyday, you know which is the best route for you to get there and you can do it without much thought, but if you have never been there and just study the route through incomplete maps with bits and pieces of information, then you will have many questions when you are required to describe a route to go from Opera House to Bondi beach.

I surfed the net (not at Bondi ) and came out something like this, again, confirmation or correction of it is most welcome:

A general tip for checking that your use of apostrophes is correct is to change the phrase around so that the part before the apostrophe becomes the last word. If it still has the same meaning, the apostrophe was correct.

Examples:
i. The traveller's handbook = The handbook of traveller
ii. Nick's Travels = The travels of Nick
iii. The paper's shop - cannot be 'the shop of paper'

Basically the 'apostrophe s' is to form 'possessive', and the mentioned noun modifier is to describe something without the interest of stressing possession.

So the school book is still the school book, we don't really want to stress the ownership here, and I think for "The Jeff Corwin Experience" he doesn't really want to stress the show is about HIS experience, but instead, HIS KIND of experience.

This far I understand. I appreciate your effort in guiding. Thanks. Suzi.

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Re: Apples or pears?

Re: Jeff Corwin Experience