Re: OT: English and schizophrenia

On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Raymond Brown wrote:
> >
> > [snip]
> > > For many years we had foreign language students stay with us for their year
> > > in Britain.  I'd always assumed the thing they'd complain most about
> > > regarding English was our crazy orthography.  Not a bit of it.  Almost
> > > without exception the biggest grumble was "English phrasal verbs".
>
> > You know, I've heard similar from English language-learners.  And if
> > you think about it, some of them seem to me really hard to guess, you
> > just have to know them:
> >
> > to hand out (out of what?)
> > to give a hand, to give a helping hand (the latter is a bit easier to
> > figure out, for me)
[snip]

> I don't think I'd find these particularly more confusing than German
> constructions of roughly equivalent weirdness:  absaufen, Ausgleich,
> Anschluß, etc.
I actually found the German separable verbs, at least,
*easier*--because they are taught as a connected word even if the
"preposition" detaches and circumscribes the clause.  :-p  I was
terribly panicked by this until I *realized* they were somewhat
analogous to English phrasal verbs.  I think in English they're
confusing because the English-language-learner tends to want to break
them down into their component parts, and they find it hard to tell
if it really is something "straightforward" (e.g. to turn away [from
someone]--and even that one's not as "straightforward" as I'd like,
vs. to turn in [for the night]) or something that just has to be
memorized, when it *looks* like a perfectly innocent verb and a
perfectly innocent preposition.  In German I could recognize what had
to be just memorized above and beyond the usual.  Perhaps that's just me.

YHL

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