Re: here is some stuff i want all of ya'll to look at even though you have better things to do.

If your school was anything like mine, they probably didn't cover even
English grammar properly, let alone that of whatever Foreign language
you were taught. I live in England, and the school system here doesn't
even teach English grammar properly... there are separate GCSEs English
and English Literature, but there might as well not be to be honest,
since both seem to consist mostly of English poems and Literature. It
took me until I was 16/17 (after doing GCSEs in English and French) to
finally learn some basic linguistic concepts, because I started reading
about languages out of interest. Before then my knowledge of language
(not counting my subconscious knowledge of English of course) amounted
to the difference between a noun, an adjective, and a verb, and of
course a few bits of sometimes misleading terminology from French (like
"Tense" incorrectly used to refer to Tense/Aspect/Mode combinations) and
little else. I truly think its awful, and its not surprising that the
English aren't very good at foreign languages, since even their own
language has never been explained to them properly. My mother, who used
to go to French classes, always used to remark that the elderly people
in the group were by far the quickest to grasp a new concept, because
when they went to school they'd been taught English grammar properly, so
they understood what the teacher was talking about when he was
explaining the grammar.
 Its nothing to be ashamed about not to know much about linguistics
because, after all, knowledge can be acquired. Read a beginner's
linguistics book (there are some in book shops here written for A level
students that explain pretty much all the basics you need) and you'll be
fine. :)

Reply