In “Think you’s good at grammar? Try my seven golden rules” from the Guardian, Jeremy Butterfield tells about the tricky of english grammar from a lot of exceptions which depend on popular usage, varied regions and sometimes preferences, for example, some editor counts the word “healthy” food as wrong grammar and use “healthful” food for instance.
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| Yippee (or groan)! It’s National Grammar Day again. Photograph: Lucien Aigner/Corbis |
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My Yes/No question is:
Do you think grammar for everyday living conversation is necessary?
My answer is:
Yes, I think using grammar appropriately can decrease some confusion. English has more definitely telling about time and person compared to many oriental languages which are categorized to different family of language. This specialty causes a lot of difficulty to many english learner, nevertheless, I don’t think grammar lesson should be regarded as the first priority in English learning. For example, most of Thai student has spent decade for English classes, which most of them is grammar lessons, still they cannot use English for everyday living.
Back to the main purpose of language, it is to communicate to other people, so how can a good class make you frightened or feeling guilty for mistake rather than the confidence of experience after trial and error? In our class, Peter point out two writing exercises in our textbook which are response writing and academic writing. Some might think the second one is more important , in contrast, I value the response writing more. This doesn’t mean organisation is easy for me but the hard time in writing is getting idea which response writing invite us to become more provocative and rethink about why we do writing. For me, the reason is to share the idea to the rest of the world.
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Reference
I like the sensible, and accurate, definition of the noun grammar in Union's source. Grammar is whatever the group of users say it is, and for any living language, that is constantly evolving. The grammar of classical Latin is exactly what Caesar, Vergil, Ovid and others made it: it's not changing because its native users are all dead.
ReplyDeleteEnglish, on the other hand, like Thai, is wonderfully alive and changing constantly. When I was at university, we didn't start sentences with coordinating conjunctions such as and, or, but of so. But today that's not uncommon even in academic writing in prestigious journals. And Harvard University academics regularly do it, so it must be correct academic English grammar! (That said, I might comment if you do it excessively, or if a particular instance seems unnatural.)
So, how can we best learn the best English grammar? What do you think?
Union's chosen source to respond to is very relevant to what we are doing in our class. Do you agree with him and his source?
And I like Union's comments about the value of blogging. It's relaxed, so can be quick. It will probably take you longer than me to write your blog posts because the first part, the Source Background section is actually academic writing, where you do have to worry about content and organization, but the second part is easy: whatever comes to your mind is your response.
DeleteThe same goes for responding: if someone says something that you strongly agree with, or even better that you strongly disagree with, start writing why you agree or disagree. And you might surprise yourself with a change of mind, or at least a deeper understanding. Happily, every appears to agree with pretty everything I've said so far, including that all illegal drugs should be made legal and that it is wrong to punish people with prison sentences. (I had thought there might be some disagreement with my opinions there.)
And that's my third comment for the day, so I've done my blogging homework and my late second coffee (see comment on Ploy's post) still isn't finished!
DeleteRegarding learning English grammar, it would be hard to say what it the best to learn the best English grammar due to different characteristics, preferences, level of basic English skills of each person. Generally speaking (for English and other languages), I think we should not directly start learning via any grammar books. Rather, we should learn naturally by listening a lot first. Then, we have to practice speaking, reading and writing regularly, respectively. Good grammar textbooks, in my opinion, should be just references, not for books to be good at any languages. Learning English or any languages through real using, imitating, making mistakes and correcting them repeatedly should be a typical approach for everyone since we can see how vocabulary and grammar are and should be related in a specific context under different situations and periods of time.
DeleteI don't totally disagree with your answer as you have written that the main purpose of a language is to be used as a medium to communicate between people. But as the question asks about the necessity of grammar for everyday living conversation, I would say no for it. As the priority of the conversation is to communicate with someone successfully, grammar is not actually necessary. People can still understand or be able guess even if the message sender writes just words in broken English grammar. On the other hand, I agree with your idea that learning a language should not be stressful and frightening. We all just need to communicate, not to be too serious on using grammar and not to be afraid to talk with others.
ReplyDeleteI used to think like you before. After attending conversation hours at AUA, I've found that the teacher needed to correct tense used in student's conversation in order to avoid misunderstanding.
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