ENGLISH, mf, do you even speak it?
 

Since I got so much valuable help, explanations and corrections on here lately (thank you, Hobbit, vixnix, RBG & everyone else), I spam "but is this correct?" questions in every other thread now, which I assume is super annoying.

Figured we could have one English learning/improving topic .

The weird thing is when I ask coworkers or American friends, I would need to see their explanations in writing to get it. "Well, that is gerund and you...blablabla" - a red light in my head starts blinking, demanding to read the explanation, I can't follow it while talking. Which is unfortunate.

RBG, thank you so much for explaining appositives.
I recall you were miserable teaching in middle schools, that environment wasn't for you. But you have a gift of explaining things a) logical and b) with enough detail but without going overboard, that even I get it. You could look into all these "English for foreigners" classes, you would do great.

:blush:

Really glad I could help, I do have a passion for English... but to be honest, most of what I know is through intuitive understanding of the language, which I can't really take credit for because I have always been naturally good at writing. I had to look up appositions to make sure I could explain it correctly. Actually, the only class I ever dropped out of was a grammar class. It was kicking my ass after 2 weeks :erm:

also took, I hope your Saturday morning is as entertaining as mine. You mentioned gerund. I now I had my old grammar books open, on the chapter

"verbs + possessive adjective/pronoun object + gerund"

and for the first time in my life I am considering to give Burzum a try. It might sound exactly like what my brain looks like.

yea I keep wondering if I actually need to know the terms for it. I am good enough in German to proofread a master thesis, and I couldn't tell you the grammatical terms for it. I'd like to...hm. To get it right, without knowing all the fancy terms for it, I think. Because those fancy terms and the dry explanations to it drive me up the walls right now.

For these language lessons like I took one in French this summer - despite having talked French daily for years now - you didn't get the dry academical stuff. You were corrected, it was explained, reasons for why x is wrong were given, but no "apposition vs appositive" stuff. Something like that is very useful for people who don't intend to go into academics with a language, maybe you'd enjoy it.

i wish i didn't

what language would you prefer then? I love that English has certain words that German doesn't have.

sleek is one of those. English is much more imaginative, to me. Or poetic, you can go for more detail with a single word.


or "sunset clause", one of my favorite terms ever. There is no way in hell that anything in the legal field would be named like that in German. It's a no nonsense, dry, cut-throat language, practicality comes first. English is beautiful.

I wish I could hear what English sounds like to a non-native speaker because it's such a mutt of French, German, Latin, Greek, etc

haha yea. to me it still sounds like the magic of Smashing Pumpkins lyrics.
I am not alone with that, I heard it from many non native speakers over the years, who started falling in love with English through music, around 10-12. Looking up lyrics, word for word. I did that throughout middle and high school.
crestfallen. It was pure magic to me.

BC used to have a great vocabulary in his lyrics as well

I had actually forgotten that pavementtune wasn't an English speaker until this thread. I have great fun chatting about the strangeness of English/German to my brothers, 2 of whom grew up speaking German and are now learning English, while I'm the opposite.

You get some odd conversations.

hey rbg you ever thought of teaching esl overseas?

I believe that "considering to give" is wrong and that it should be "considering giving", but this is a case of the blind leading the blind, so we may want to have that confirmed.

I would just say "I'm considering trying Burzum" and leave out "giving" all together...but both are correct ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You can't go wrong with Burzum.


¯\_(ツ)_/¯

in luv wif da shrug!

hey if you are thinking about going back to school or getting into editing someday you might want to consider online classes. i am trying to get into similar stuff, so I am taking an editing course online. maybe that could work with you having to stay home most of the time.

Thanks. I'm pretty sure that's my best option, considering I also live in a place that has no actual universities to complete a graduate degree.

I don't like english that much
but that's the only foreign language I know so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I remember my German teacher telling us that there was no English word for "rausch". I learned German for a year at high school. She was teaching us a song called "Himmel, Erde, Luft und Meer", and there was a line with a waterfall "rausch"-ing, and she told us the only word English had was "babbling", and it was a shitty substitute.

I love German...but especially the longer words. And the irreplaceable words like doppelgänger, and schadenfreude. My husband's German colleague also told him that "angst" had no English equivalent, which is why we just use the German word.

My poor cousin, who has spoken fluent French since high school days, now lives with her German husband in Karlsruhe, and is trying pretty hard to get her B1 in German, so she can naturalise, but she reckons German is a lot harder than French, because French was the last influence on English, so our sentence structures have much more in common. I hadn't considered that before. I always found German easier to learn, because of the vocab and pronunciation similarities. But high school German is pretty simple.

A guy I met in uni told me I was missing out, reading Hesse in English. We were in law school together, but he had already finished a BA in French and German, so read Hesse in German and Camus in French, etc. I felt pretty sad about that, because I loved reading Hesse, and felt like I got so much out of his writing...it was sad to think there was even more, beyond my reach.

That's mostly bragging. It's not because you are fluent in a language that you venture in its native literature without any compromise... Most of the times a good translation is always better than trying to decipher centuries of accumulated knowledge a literary work usually requires...

I was two years into studying Czech when they finally told me that Kafka writes in German.

Lol
A famous English professor from my college came to Brazil to learn Spanish
I am not kiding

¡Ay, qué boludo!

Was he famous for being clueless?

struggling with prepositional phrases (noun, adjective, adverb). i keep on labelle-ing adverbials as adjectivals.

I mean, get a load of this patriarch of a sentence:

He turned [for a moment]ADV to glance [behind him]ADV [at the stately clock]N [on the steeple]ADJ [of the town hall]ADJ to check his progress and make sure he was not running late.

I got "on the steeple" wrong. Apparently it is an adverbial phrase. I thought it modified "the stately clock", making it an adjective.

fuck

I have no idea, but you seem to have a hangup with adjectives in general, you wanted "message board" to be an adjective just because it was combined with "dweller".

so maybe if you go back to some overall chapter on adjectives and beat that into your head, it won't come back to haunt you later?

ouch, that hurt me deeply in my heart. I speak and write Montese like a pro, though!

I had actually forgotten that pavementaltune wasn't an English speaker until this thread.


shouldn't it be "isn't an English speaker"?

also I believe the term is "Montesque" . :)

I keep reading your patriarch of a sentence.

when you get an answer wrong, is there an explanation to the correct answer?

why on earth is "on the staple" NOT modifying the clock? it gives you the exact location of the clock, I don't get it.



"I HAD forgotten" would require "wasn't" an English speaker, while "I forgot that she isn't an English speaker" would be correct? no? I'll go to the playground now, this is making me mad.

I can post my questions on a discussion board and my prof explains. She's really, really good at grammar.

So some time later today we will know why. Stay tuned.

question of the day:

why is it "stood away" here, and not "stayed away"?

They're two different verbs?

Stand - stood
Stay - stayed

my question is why would you choose one verb and not the other, not what the past tense is

No, I realise that. I just meant to say maybe it was just the choice of verb. As in, maybe there's no reason why he went with stood.

I don't know. I'm bored to the point of feeling inclined to respond to all posts. Maybe I shouldn't.

ahaha, I am at work, too. you could hit one of these custom pages and get that octopus up for sale on tote bags. or shirts. it's glorious.

It should be stayed away. I think you can't stand away. It is a verb that indicates a lack of movement

:embarass:

I think it makes sense. Away is an adverb which modifies stood. Where did Shad stand? He stood away from Netphoria. It is sound grammar.

Like Queen said, it's just a different word choice. "Stayed away" would be more common phraseology with "stood away" being slightly more expressive and interesting (at least to me), but they both work and neither is an unusual way to say it.