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

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004 14:12:09 +0100, Joe <joe@...> wrote:

>Chris Bates wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>
>In my school, forn grammar was covered significantly better then English
>grammar.
It's the same here in Switzerland (except perhaps for the discussion
on "nominalization" which is forced by the bad habit of German orthography
to capitalize nouns). But in foreign grammar, the linguistics also tend to
be very superficial (like "Tense" colloquially used to refer to
Tense/Aspect/Mode combinations).

I think the reason is that you can manage most of your natural language
without having any explicit knowledge of its grammar, but also that most
language teachers hate grammar and teach their students to do so, too.

It's a common argument for Latin courses that Latin makes you learn
linguistics/grammar, as if linguistics/grammar would be a peculiar
characteristic of Latin. I was happy to have a German teacher how made lots
of linguistics, but this was very exceptional.

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust