Re: Grammar in HS (Was: Re: Argument Structures)

On Wed, Aug 23, 2000 at 03:50:56PM -0400, nicole perrin wrote:
[snip]
> Maybe this is a silly question, but is grammar of one's native langauge
> taught in countries other than the US?  Because here almost everyone
> grows up without knowing even what subject and object are.  I always
> think it's a stupid practice (or non-practice) but I wonder what it's
> like in other places?
Yes. I'm from Malaysia, and in primary school (equiv of grade 1-6 in N.
America) I was in a Chinese school where they taught elementary Chinese
(Mandarin) grammar, proverbs, etc.. I don't remember much, mostly 'cos I
was a slacker back then. :-P But in addition to that, we had to learn
Malay, esp. 'cos from secondary school onwards (equiv grade 7 onwards),
*everything* was taught in Malay -- textbooks and exams were in Malay,
even in the nominal "chinese" or "indian" or even "english" schools. There
were definitely lessons on Malay grammar, even for students who are Malay
by race. (Aside: I used to shudder at the frightening complexity of Malay
verbs, which have a system of prefixes and suffixes with sometimes
inconsistent (or, unexpected, I should say) nuances... but now I wish I'd
paid more attention to them in class -- what I know of verb conjugations
now is mostly from Indo-European languages; wish I had a better grasp of
how those Malay suffixes work, might turn out useful in my conlang...)

And of course, we also had to learn English (to various degrees of
competency, depending on the school), so imagine my shock when I came to
N. America and discovered that apparently students here aren't even taught
English phonetics (don't even mention grammar), they are just taught to
follow the "gut feeling" they get when they see a word. (This, IMNSHO, is
probably why the schwa sound is becoming increasingly prevalent in spoken
English. Native English speakers may not notice this, but I remember
having a lot of trouble deciphering spoken English that sounds like a
string of consonants punctuated by the occasional vowel which isn't
pronounced exactly in the most intuitive way, either. I honestly won't be
surprised that sometime in the future, the vowels in unstressed syllables
won't even be written out anymore, since it makes no difference to the
pronunciation. But enough of this rant, before I get flamed ;-)


T