If you want to watch a Japanese person count mentally, ask them how many years they studied English. The answer will be "six" if they've graduated from high school, or "ten" if they've been to college. Although they do study English for many years, it's not uncommon for Japanese to not really master the language very well, in part due the dry, academic way English grammar is covered in school. Did you know there were five fundamental types of sentences in English? They're SV, SVC, SVO, SVOO, and SVOC, and although I studied linguistics in college I'm not sure what they mean, though ESL students here meticulously memorize them for the next test. The Japanese are also good at coming up with ways of remembering which verbs must be used in gerund form ("stop smoking" but not "stop to smoke") and which can take either gerund or infinitive verbs (both "I like to eat chocolate" and "I like eating chocolate" are okay). Seen from the viewpoint of a native speaker, it's quite unnatural to create a framework for comprehending English grammar that doesn't actually help you, you know, speak the language at all.
If English is your native language, go hug your parents right now.
6 comments:
Interesting that we Japanese need to just learn which verbs are transitive and intransitive - I haven't seen any framework for this.
Yes, and then we we don't "know" this stuff, they think we're charlatans, just can't understand why we don't understand their strange constructions.
Supposedly there's some rule governing when the word "the" is pronounce as "thee" compared to "thuh." Expressed in Japanese meticulously as ジ and ザ naturally. I have no idea about this though, and was mocked by my daughter and son as being useless when it came to helping with homework. Sheesh...
Ya, that “thuh”-versus-“thee” rule is something that most native English speakers are unaware of. However, an easy way to remember this rule is that it’s quite similar to the rule governing the use of the indefinite articles “a”-versus-“an”. If the noun begins with a consonant, we say “a shoestring”, and conversely, if the noun begins with a vowel, we say “an apple”. Similarly, we should say “thuh shoestring”, and “thee apple”. Fortunately, no one is going to summon the grammar police if any of us were to ignore the “thuh”-versus-“thee” rule. Indeed, even Merriam-Webster suggests that we can be reasonably relaxed about this rule in common speach. We can also use the pronunciation “thee” for emphasis before titles and proper names: “Remember thee Alamo!”; another use is to suggest uniqueness: “This is thee most disgusting natto I’ve ever tasted!”
We always say "big white house" and "little red wagon", never "white big house" or "red little wagon". Your kids will probably be taught some complex formula for determining the order of consecutive adjectives. We just pick up the "size before color" rule as we grow without being aware of it.
Please post further adventures in your ongoing encounter with Japanese-style English teaching. Indeed, if you post your kids' queries timely enough, friends like Deedubb above might come along with timely answers that will prevent ol' Dad from looking like quite so much a doofus!
Now as to your caption for everyone going to hug parents if their native language is English.. I should say the same thing backwards for Japanese.. well this is pretty opposite for what a Japanese would think, but since I am trying to pick up Japanese.. >_<
Haha, yes. And my kids get both for "free" (well, not quite, but almost). My wife and I let them know how lucky they are often ^_^
Post a Comment