Search results for 'tag:Nouns tag:English as a second language' matching tags 'Nouns' and 'English as a second language'

Re: This is.. these are

AlpheccaStars — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 19:59:35 GMT

I have taught English as a Second language to new learners.

The question/answer pair "What is this?" / "This is a ..." Â is lesson 2 (after introductions "Hello, my name is...", "What's your name?")

t teaches students how to ask for vocabulary words.Â

It teaches that English uses a change in word order to make a question from a statement.

It is a basis for teaching the word order for adjectives:

"This is a pencil."

"This is a red pencil."

"This is a yellow pencil."

The question/answer pair "What are these?" / "These are..." Â is the next step.Â

It reinforces the idea of word order, and the question word "what".

It teaches subject/verb agreement for the most important verb in English, making plurals by adding -s, dropping the article "a" in the plural, and that adjectives are not inflected.

"These are pencils."

"These are red pencils."

"These areÂ yellowÂ pencils."

That's a lot of grammar for one lesson!!

Later on, you can teach more complex rules such as the difference between this (something near) and that (something far) and pronouns such as "it" and "they".

Re: Singular or a plural verb with a collective noun?

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 05:23:52 GMT

Dear Marina, I am glad you care a lot for English plural forms of nouns. You are probably learning English as a Second Language.

The noun police is followed by a plural verb because it is a very big group of people. For one Individual, we talk of a Policeman or a policewoman. For the word Family, I need to check with other coleagues.

Chris, a Student

Kigali Institute of Education

Faculty of Arts and Languages

English and Literature With Education (Year III)

Re: "s" and "z"

Pter — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:41:41 GMT

Thank you very much CJ, Zerox, and Carson. You all have given me very valuable advices. After reading through all you said carefully, and then watching a couple of English TV programmes, I believe I can now tell the difference! The ending /z/ in most cases are much shorter, voiced but less audible than the hissing sound of the ending /s/. Now, I found out what's the problem. Those sound files I was listening to are from a pronouncing dictionary. And perhaps in trying to make them as clearly audible as possible, both the ending /s/ and ending /z/ are spoken very "clearly" and become unnatural.

For people like me that learn English as a second language, we are often influenced heavily by our mother tongue. This is like looking at something through a piece of tainted glass. In those aspects where our mother tongue has big differences with English, unless we are told the rules explicitly, we often never realize how people really say them in English just by listening. My mother tongue does not have any voiced consonants and consonant clusters, therefore, it is quite a challenge for me to learn how to pronounce a cluster of voiced consonants, such as /-ndz/, /-gz/, /zd/.

Again, thank you very much to you all. You really helped me a lot!

=======================
EDIT:

Let me summarize what I have learnt here plus a little that I have discovered myself.

1. Final voiced consonant (b, d, g, l, m, n, ng, r, v, voiced th) + s ---> /z/
2. Final voiceless consonant (f, k, p, t, voiceless th) + s ---> /s/
3. Final vowel + s ---> no rules, except when any of the following rules apply
4. Some words that can be used both as verb and noun/adjective ---> verb: /z/, noun or adjective: /s/
5. Words ending in -as, -is, -os, -us:
when the s is part of the word in its basic form (not plural or third party singular verb) ---> /s/
when the s is added to make it a plural or third party singluar verb ---> /z/
6. Words ending in -ces, -des, -oes, -shes, -ses, -zes ---> /z/
7. Words ending in -sis, -nce, -nse, -ss (including -less, ness), -sce ---> /s/
8. /z/ is more common than /s/ overall

Re: "s" and "z"

Carson21 — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:25:56 GMT

I don't know what you guys are all on about with devoiced /z/. It's not a devoiced /z/, it's just /s/. In the example that someone above used, "vases"... I don't know about up North or across the pond (either one), but American Standard has that as /s/ in the medial and /z/ in the final. Well, if you pronounce the <a> like you do in "bratwurst" or "father", then the medial would become /z/.

Pter, the basic rule is this: final <s> becomes voiced to /z/ when it is final in most verbs and/or after a voiced stop (/g b d/ etc). It remains unvoiced /s/ for most nouns and adjectives. It also can voice when the closest (previous) consonant was already /s/. (Abuses, vases, faces, places)

Here's the other basic rule that will probably help you, even if at first it seems to be "maddening the unhelpful": In English, there are a million rules, and every rule has a million exceptions. English is probably as far removed from a loglang as you can get, so it helps to just accept what you learn at face value and imitate it, rather than trying to figure out "why". You can ask "why" all day and use up all the time where you could have been moving on to the next rule. Look at the general rule for each case, then apply it. You learn irregularities as you go (much like learning Spanish verbs).

The perfect example of an exception: assess. It has /s/ in the medial AND final. D'oh! Just have to remember that one.

As for how important it is that you learn the difference between /s/ and /z/... I don't think it's that big a deal. If the spelling shows <s>, then saying /s/ or /z/ won't make much of a difference if your goal is to just be understood. They're allophones, essentially. We could drop <z> from our orthography and get along just fine. However, if your goal is to sound like a native speaker, then, yes, it's quite important that you can make the distinction.

Last, if you pronounced all <s> as /s/... You might sound strange to most people in the UK and the northern United States (plus the commonwealth), but anywhere in the West, Southwest, South East, and Border states in the US, no one would think twice about it! There are a lot of people in those regions that speak English as a second language with Spanish as their first, and they tend to always use /s/ for <s> , regardless of typical conventions.

Tricky or trick

Rotter — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 09:20:50 GMT

Speaking as a teacher, I get irritated when I see questions like this in an examination. I feel that it is a trick question. I hope it was not in an exam for those learning English as a Second language.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I copied the above from the question under the title 'Whomever vs whoever'.

I fell that it is a trick question.
The above should be ' I feel it is a tricky question.'
The word trick is a noun and the word tricky is the adjective.
The noun 'question' is modified by an adjective.

What do you think?

Re: Two sentences under a microscope

Grammar Geek — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 15:35:25 GMT

Hi Believer,

It's my setence, I know, and it sure looks silly without the entire conversation, doesn't it? I have been thinking about this. Another example of how a native speaker just "knows" it - and I'm sure one of the teachers of English as a second language can explain this better.

In a consturction I am NOUN (or he is NOUN) you need the article. But I am ADJECTIVE, you do not use one.

I am happy, he is rude. (adjectives)

I am generally a happy person I know. He is the rudest person I've ever met. (nouns)

You had used an example - something like "He is the rudest person I know" - rudest is an adjective describing person. There, you need the article as part of the noun phrase "the rudest person I know."

I am the happiest = I am the happiest that I know how to be. Isn't there a rule about articles before superlatives?

Try to do well vs. try to do THE BEST that you can? I am thinner than I was vs. I am THE MOST slender that I have ever been.

So we still come back to why you can leave out the "the" before happiest, which is a superlative. And this is where we need a language teacher. Is it simply idiomatic, or is there another reason? I just know that it "sounds" okay either way.

Regarding your second sentence, I would not have used the "and" - but I hope you will keep in mind that many of us write our explanations squeezed in between other activities in our day and don't spend the time in formal composition that we would put into more formal corresondence.

Re: in a hospital ? in hospital ? in the... ?

paco2004 — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 02:58:16 GMT

Hi guys

I have no intention to offend anyone, but the article below is the one I found online. Do you believe this is a true story?

The use of "the" in terms like "going to hospital/the hospital" is usually ascribed to the influence of Irish English on the American language in the 19th century. Before 1870, most of the Irish immigrants to the US had grown up speaking Gaelic, and had adopted English as a second language either in Ireland or after landing in America, a pattern that gradually changed as the Gaelic language gave up ground to English once more Irish acquired a British-mandated school education.

Irish Gaelic did not use any definite article equivalent to "the" to denote generic/specific noun aspects as in English. When speakers of Irish Gaelic switched to speaking English, they tended to confuse this particular grammatical nuance of English.

In Merry Old England this was considered a primitive misuse of the language. In the New World, however, the Irish, among the many immigrant groups, were often construed as "native English speakers" by default, even though many of them were actually secondary speakers of English prior to 1880. Thus the use of "the hospital", based in an irregular form, became accepted in American English.

paco

countable or uncountable? That is the question...

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 05:42:35 GMT

I am one of those people who learned American English as a second language.

American English dictionaries never mention anything about a particular noun being countable and uncountable. I learned mass nouns and abstract nouns, both of which are uncountable. I had thought it was up to an individual to decide whether a noun is mass or abstract one, therefore uncountable.

After having lived in the States for so many years, I discovered that British English dictionaries do designate each noun as countable noun or uncountable or both.

I am quite curious as to who decides such things. Do they take votes among the "expert grammarians"?

I discovered yesterday that 'announcement' is a countable noun and I had thought until then it was an uncountable one because it sounded as if it were an abstract one.

I hope somebody will have some good answers to this thought-provoking( (-; ) question.

Adverbial objectives

paco2004 — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 06:59:15 GMT

Many English nouns and noun phrases can be used as adverbs. They are called "adverbial objectives". From the standpoint of word order, an adverbial objective is put as if it were an objective of a verb, but actually it works as an adverbial modifier of the verb. This sort of constructs comes from an Old English grammar rule that allowed ti use accusative cases of nouns as adverbs. For example, let's take an Old English sentence "He eode ham"[=He went home]. From the view of current English the word "ham" [home] would be treated as an adverb but it was the accusative of the noun "ham" in Old English. In current English this sort of noun phrase uses is prominent especially in the case the noun phrases means "time/duration", "space/direction/distance", "measure/degree", "manner" and others.

Time/Duration
[1.] Did you see him this morning?
[2.] What time shall we go?
[3.] She is thirty years old.
[4.] I'd like to start Wednesday, the first jury day. ["the first jury day" is appositive to "Wednesday"]
[5.] Please tell me what day you are free.
[6.] The parcel arrived last week.
[7.] They prayed all night in the cathedral.
[8.] They walked two hours.
Some other examples of noun phrases of this use:
every day, next week, next Monday, the day after tomorrow, one of these days, one day, any day in this week, etc.

Space/Direction/Distance
[1.] Today I came a different way. ["Today" is a TIME ad. ob.]
[2.] Elms stood either side of the street.
[3.] Let's go some place.
[4.] He lives next door.
[5.] She'll come home soon.
[6.] Come this way, please!
[7.] We wandered north and north.
[8.] We walked ten miles.

Measure
[1.] She was thirty years old.
[2.] The bottles was about three quarters full.
[3.] They stood up together *** high in the sea.
[4.] He stands head and shoulders above his fellow.
[5.] Her skin was snow white.
[6.] It was pitch dark inside the room.
[7.] Stars are diamond bright and there is no dew.
[8.] The sea went mountains high.

Degree
[1.] I should not mind a bit.
[2.] She blamed herself no end.
[3.] She used to laugh a good/great deal.

Manner
[1.] Don't look at me that way.
[2.] He speaks good English
[3.] He came full speed.
[4.] He stood there sailor-fashon.
[5.] She run upstairs two steps at a time.
[6.] They walked barefoot.
[7.] Our ship sailed first thing in the morning.

Noun Couplets
[1.] Bind him hand and foot.
[2.] He smote them hip and thigh.
[3.] We all got to go sometime reason or no reason.
[4.] Let's fight tooth and nail.
[5.] They discussed the matter heart to heart.
Some other examples of couplets: day after day, year after year, face to face.

The Superlative and the Comparative
[1.] My father liked this hat the best.
[2.] He runs the faster.
[3.] She couldn't know which she liked the better.
[4.] I don't know whose eyes would be the widest open.

Distribution
[1.] She visited the States twice a year.
[2.] He paid $ 20 a pair for my shoes.

To my guess, these collocations are so common that most of native speakers could acquire them even without knowing the concept of "adverbial objectives". And (therefore?) many of grammar books currently available don't mention this, and dictionaries give a definition to a noun used as an adverbial adverb as an adverb separately from the definition as a noun. As for the complex adverbial objectives, they are explained as simple idiomatic phrases without giving any grammatical explanation. Accordingly, in teaching English as a second language too, the concept of "adverbial objectives" is rarely taught at the beginner's stages in school at least in Japan. So many of English learners in Japan (including me) learned theses expressions one by one without knowing the mechanism why native speakers use nouns as adverbs. I sometimes feel it might be better to let students know the concept of "adverbial objectives" at an earlier stage of English learning and it could be helpful for them to learn this kind of noun usage more efficiently. But I'm not sure. I would like to hear opinions from English teachers (especially those who teach English to ESL students) about this.

paco

Here Is The Origin and History of The English Language

Guest — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 12:30:24 GMT

English is a Germanic Language of the Indo-European Family. It is the second most spoken language in the world.

It is estimated that there are 300 million native speakers and 300 million who use English as a second language and a further 100 million use it as a foreign language. It is the language of science, aviation, computing, diplomacy, and tourism. It is listed as the official or co-official language of over 45 countries and is spoken extensively in other countries where it has no official status. English plays a part in the cultural, political or economic life of the following countries. Majority English speaking populations are shown in bold.

Antigua
Australia
Bahamas
Barbados
Belize
Bermuda
Botswana
Brunei (with Malay)
Cameroon (with French)
Canada (with French)
Dominica
Fiji
Gambia
Ghana
Grenada
Guyana
India (with several Indian languages)
Ireland (with Irish Gaelic)
Jamaica
Kenya (with Swahili)
Kiribati
Lesotho (with Sotho)
Liberia
Malawi (with Chewa)
Malta (with Maltese)
Mauritius
Namibia (with Afrikaans)
Nauru (with Nauruan)
New Zealand
Nigeria
Pakistan (with Urdu)
Papua New Guinea
Philippines (with Tagalog)
Puerto Rico (with Spanish)
St Christopher and Nevis
St Lucia
St Vincent
Senegal (with French)
Seychelles (with French)
Sierra Leone
Singapore (with Malay, Mandarin and Tamil)
South Africa (with Afrikaans, Xhosa and Zulu)
Surinam (with Dutch)
Swaziland (with Swazi)
Tanzania (with Swahili)
Tonga (with Tongan)
Trinidad and Tobago
Tuvalu
Uganda
United Kingdom and its dependecies
United States of America and its dependencies
Vanatu (with French)
Western Samoa (with Samoan)
Zambia
Zimbabwe

This compares to 27 for French, 20 for Spanish and 17 for Arabic. This domination is unique in history. Speakers of languages like French, Spanish and Arabic may disagree, but English is on its way to becoming the world's unofficial international language. Mandarin (Chinese) is spoken by more people, but English is now the most widespread of the world's languages.

Half of all business deals are conducted in English. Two thirds of all scientific papers are written in English. Over 70% of all post / mail is written and addressed in English. Most international tourism, aviation and diplomacy is conducted in English.

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The history of the language can be traced back to the arrival of three Germanic tribes to the British Isles during the 5th Century AD. Angles, Saxons and Jutes crossed the North Sea from what is the present day Denmark and northern Germany. The inhabitants of Britain previously spoke a Celtic language. This was quickly displaced. Most of the Celtic speakers were pushed into Wales, Cornwall and Scotland. One group migrated to the Brittany Coast of France where their descendants still speak the Celtic Language of Breton today. The Angles were named from Engle, their land of origin. Their language was called Englisc from which the word, English derives.

An Anglo-Saxon inscription dated between 450 and 480AD is the oldest sample of the English language.

During the next few centuries four dialects of English developed:

Northumbrian in Northumbria, north of the Humber
Mercian in the Kingdom of Mercia
West Saxon in the Kingdom of Wessex
Kentish in Kent

During the 7th and 8th Centuries, Northumbria's culture and language dominated Britain. The Viking invasions of the 9th Century brought this domination to an end (along with the destruction of Mercia). Only Wessex remained as an independent kingdom. By the 10th Century, the West Saxon dialect became the official language of Britain. Written Old English is mainly known from this period. It was written in an alphabet called Runic, derived from the Scandinavian languages. The Latin Alphabet was brought over from Ireland by Christian missionaries. This has remained the writing system of English.

At this time, the vocabulary of Old English consisted of an Anglo Saxon base with borrowed words from the Scandinavian languages (Danish and Norse) and Latin. Latin gave English words like street, kitchen, kettle, cup, cheese, wine, angel, bishop, martyr, candle. The Vikings added many Norse words: sky, egg, cake, skin, leg, window (wind eye), husband, fellow, skill, anger, flat, odd, ugly, get, give, take, raise, call, die, they, their, them. Celtic words also survived mainly in place and river names (Devon, Dover, Kent, Trent, Severn, Avon, Thames).

Many pairs of English and Norse words coexisted giving us two words with the same or slightly differing meanings. Examples below.

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Norse --------------------English
anger --------------------- wrath
nay ----------------------- no
fro ------------------------ from
raise ---------------------- rear
ill -------------------------- sick
bask ---------------------- bathe
skill ----------------------- craft
skin ----------------------- hide
dike ----------------------- ditch
skirt -----------------------shirt
scatter -------------------- shatter
skip ----------------------- shift

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In 1066 the Normans conquered Britain. French became the language of the Norman aristocracy and added more vocabulary to English. More pairs of similar words arose.

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French----------------English
close-------------------shut
reply ------------------answer
odour -----------------smell
annual ----------------yearly
demand --------------ask
chamber--------------room
desire-----------------wish
power-----------------might
ire---------------------wrath / anger

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Because the English underclass cooked for the Norman upper class, the words for most domestic animals are English (ox, cow, calf, sheep, swine, deer) while the words for the meats derived from them are French (beef, veal, mutton, pork, bacon, venison).

The Germanic form of plurals (house, housen; shoe, shoen) was eventually displaced by the French method of making plurals: adding an s (house, houses; shoe, shoes). Only a few words have retained their Germanic plurals: men, oxen, feet, teeth, children.

French also affected spelling so that the cw sound came to be written as qu (eg. cween became queen).

It wasn't till the 14th Century that English became dominant in Britain again. In 1399, King Henry IV became the first king of England since the Norman Conquest whose mother tongue was English. By the end of the 14th Century, the dialect of London had emerged as the standard dialect of what we now call Middle English. Chaucer wrote in this language.

Modern English began around the 16th Century and, like all languages, is still changing. One change occurred when the th of some verb forms became s (loveth, loves: hath, has). Auxillary verbs also changed (he is risen, he has risen).

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The historical influence of language in the British Isles can best be seen in place names and their derivations.

Examples include ac (as in Acton, Oakwood) which is Anglo-Saxon for oak; by (as in Whitby) is Old Norse for farm or village; pwll (as in Liverpool) is Welsh for anchorage; baile (as in Balmoral) is Gaelic for farm or village; ceaster (as in Lancaster) is Latin for fort.

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Since the 16th Century, because of the contact that the British had with many peoples from around the world, and the Renaissance of Classical learning, many words have entered the language either directly or indirectly. New words were created at an increasing rate. Shakespare coined over 1600 words. This process has grown exponentially in the modern era.

Borrowed words include names of animals (giraffe, tiger, zebra), clothing (pyjama, turban, shawl), food (spinach, chocolate, orange), scientific and mathematical terms (algebra, geography, species), drinks (tea, coffee, cider), religious terms (Jesus, Islam, nirvana), sports (checkmate, golf, billiards), vehicles (chariot, car, coach), music and art (piano, theatre, easel), weapons (pistol, trigger, rifle), political and military terms (commando, admiral, parliament), and astronomical names (Saturn, Leo, Uranus).

Languages that have contributed words to English include Latin, Greek, French, German, Arabic, Hindi (from India), Italian, Malay, Dutch, Farsi (from Iran and Afganistan), Nahuatl (the Aztec language), Sanskrit (from ancient India), Portuguese, Spanish, Tupi (from South America) and Ewe (from Africa).

The list of borrowed words is enormous.

The vocabulary of English is the largest of any language.

Even with all these borrowings the heart of the language remains the Anglo-Saxon of Old English. Only about 5000 or so words from this period have remained unchanged but they include the basic building blocks of the language: household words, parts of the body, common animals, natural elements, most pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and auxiliary verbs. Grafted onto this basic stock was a wealth of contributions to produce, what many people believe, is the richest of the world's languages.