vanilla Wishlist

[Beorne]

llamabeast said:
Beorne, can you tell me the typos? To me it seems that I didn't make any errors.

[Beorne]

Tifone said:
I dunno if Swan is joking or speaking for real, but it's true that here in Italy there's plenty of mediocre professors (not all of them are, of course) that teach you mainly the Elizabethan period and Shakespear's history, in the english classes. In italian. Self-teach or perish!

You're lucky, my english professor did astrology all the time!

[Renojustin]

llamabeast said:
I once persuaded a friend that, technically, "several" meant "about seven", while "many" meant "about 12".

This should be in your signature.

[Swan]

im serious. my prof said that grammar is useless because others will understand you anyway and so we did only english topic, like name of things in english, name of people ecc..

[Beorne]

We're doomed ....

[JimMorrison]

Swan said:
im serious. my prof said that grammar is useless because others will understand you anyway and so we did only english topic, like name of things in english, name of people ecc..

He must spend a lot of time in internet chat rooms with American teenagers.

That'll teach anyone to devalue things like grammar, spelling, sentence structure.....

[Gandalf Parker]

Actually I can see the point when teaching a second language.
There is a long way to go between a level where you can be understood, and a level where you are fluent. Spending a lot of time on syntax vs more "words" can be inefficient. The most misunderstandings occur more from lack of thesaurus than from incorrect syntax.

[JimMorrison]

Well that is especially true of modern English I suppose, since we've absorbed more words than we invented. Pretty soon the world will only speak English, not because other languages get forgotten, but because they become incorporated, until everything is just "English". O.o

[Gandalf Parker]

Im often the "translator" in various work environments. Not because I speak languages, but because I know more english than most of my coworkers. The person needing translation is speaking english, but as a second language. They are clear enough to be understood but they often had been taught only one word for each thing. When the english speaker tried to tell them something, the conversation tended to bomb at the first effort with a shrug from the non-native person. The english speaker was unable to re-try their statement waith variations. I was abit of a thesaurus so with a few tries I was usually able to hit the right words to get the point across.

[lch]

True, the first thing that you'll learn when learning a second language is the vocabulary. That's to give you access to the objects you'll have to interact with. But it's only the first step. To really understand a language, you have to learn its grammar. That's what will make the step towards being able to steer constructing your sentences with the words falling into place and connecting automatically while you make up the sentence, without the cerebral effort of fishing for the "right words" and going through a map native->second language all the time. You'll switch your language mode like pulling a trigger in your brain.

It's the same as children are taught and learning to speak.