Moderator:Forum Administrators
Babbsagg wrote:made had bad experiences
at all costs
a LCCI certificate (a London Chamber of Commerce and Industry certificate as a proof of language skills to help with job applications)
vijayjohn wrote:at all costs
I would say "an LCCI certificate."
Babbsagg wrote:I was delighted whenever I had a native speaker as a teacher because they were leagues above and I knew I could trust them.
Luís wrote:It was hard for her to explain how things actually worked
Ironically her pronunciation was actually better in some aspects (not mixing sh/s - zh/z - ch/c all the time )
kevin wrote:Babbsagg wrote:I was delighted whenever I had a native speaker as a teacher because they were leagues above and I knew I could trust them.
It's not like native speakers are perfect as teachers, they just have different problems. They usually know how to say something, but they can't necessarily explain why. Just knowing what feels right doesn't mean that you really know the rules. And it has even happened to me before that when I made a native speaker think about the rules, the theory confused them so much that in that moment they convinced themselves that some example was right even though it was actually wrong.
Babbsagg wrote:That's true too. A non-native may be more aware of the rules and know better what learners need to know. Maybe it was because in recent years when I was having a few English classes again I was on an advanced level already
Babbsagg wrote:Similar to how I tend to say things about German which in some cases may be just local usage.
I wondered about my correction that it's rather "sauweh" rather than "mordsweh", things like this can be just local.
linguoboy wrote:Babbsagg wrote:That's true too. A non-native may be more aware of the rules and know better what learners need to know. Maybe it was because in recent years when I was having a few English classes again I was on an advanced level already
Speaking of subtlety, the TAM usage in this sentence sounds slightly off to me, though I can't find anything ungrammatical about it. Other natives want to weigh in?
Babbsagg wrote:linguoboy wrote:Babbsagg wrote:That's true too. A non-native may be more aware of the rules and know better what learners need to know. Maybe it was because in recent years when I was having a few English classes again I was on an advanced level already
Speaking of subtlety, the TAM usage in this sentence sounds slightly off to me, though I can't find anything ungrammatical about it. Other natives want to weigh in?
I was struggling with the sentence too, about whether to use simple past or present perfect, and perhaps in which order. It feels a little dissonant to me as well, but I can't put my finger on it.
Babbsagg wrote:However if a teacher has a poor grasp of English and doesn't understand some basic rules, they're bad for everyone, and probably worse for beginners than for advanced students.
Thinking about it, I think I do know more rules of English than of German.
I wondered about my correction that it's rather "sauweh" than "mordsweh", things like this can be just local. However in this case, I later googled it, "sauweh" returning 27,800 results and "mordsweh" 151, so I guess I wasn't far off after all. Still these are cases I should be cautious correcting.
kevin wrote:Babbsagg wrote:Thinking about it, I think I do know more rules of English than of German.
Definitely used to be the case for me. Strong and weak declension of adjectives? Never heard of it at school.
I'm not so sure if it's still true today. I've probably forgotten half of the theory about English grammar and replaced it with what feels right, and at the same time I know a bit more about German grammar now.
I wondered about my correction that it's rather "sauweh" than "mordsweh", things like this can be just local. However in this case, I later googled it, "sauweh" returning 27,800 results and "mordsweh" 151, so I guess I wasn't far off after all. Still these are cases I should be cautious correcting.
I'm not surprised that "sauweh" is more common. I just wouldn't correct "mordsweh" because it sounds completely acceptable to me, even if it's rarely used. Anyway, I kind of like these regional differences, they make sure that even as a native speaker, I can still learn something from the German discussions here.
Babbsagg wrote:(over here, you use Perfekt for past events, and you don't use preterite except for basic words like "be" and "have" and "want", end of story).
kevin wrote:Babbsagg wrote:(over here, you use Perfekt for past events, and you don't use preterite except for basic words like "be" and "have" and "want", end of story).
Which seems to become the compromise for colloquial language in more or less all of Germany.
Do you happen to know if this is the traditional use in your region or whether it was imported only recently? Here around, the preterite simply didn't exist even for the basic words, but with the invasion of all those Reigschmeckte a few preterite forms came to us.
(I hope you don't mind my derailing your thread... )
Babbsagg wrote:pretty much nonexistent (as is the genitive, it's almost always "dem sein"/"der ihr").
Return to “General Language Forum”
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 9 guests