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Moses McCormick’s admirable achievement | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| liammcg Senior Member Ireland Joined 4589 days ago 269 posts - 397 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 209 of 221 23 April 2013 at 11:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
In writing, I would use the 'correct form' using the word I. In speaking however, I would almost always use 'me' or even 'meself' (!) because of my dialect. Sure, according to the standard language my usage is wrong, but I believe it's a perfectly correct usage of the language. People communicate like this all the time in Ireland, it's a fully excepted norm (in the west anyway). Of course when people felt the need to abandon Gaelic and learn English, it would have been wrong for them as T2 speakers, but it was obviously widespread enough so that the next generation of native English speakers used it without a second thought. If I began speaking using sentences like "John, Mary and I are going", people would think that you're acting posh...no really! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4692 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 210 of 221 23 April 2013 at 1:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Fine for a linguist, not for a language learner. These audiences require different targeting mechanisms. For me as a learner of Romanian, it's much more worthwhile to know that I can speak it with a Romanian and enjoy myself than it is to know how to classify the subjunctive tense.
Obviously, but that doesn't mean natives can't be wrong, nor err on certain points (that may be distinguishable dialectal features, such as saying "heb" for "heeft" in Randstad Dutch, which is correct if I am speaking colloquial Rotterdam dialect, but not in any standard environment where I need to teach people standard Dutch for use around the country). These dialectalisms are things I *do* use, but only in a context where that is dictated by the social norm that I can. Edited by tarvos on 23 April 2013 at 1:05pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| casamata Senior Member Joined 4247 days ago 237 posts - 377 votes Studies: Portuguese | Message 211 of 221 23 April 2013 at 6:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Well, I actually posted in another thread how in African American English they pronounce "ask" as "aks". However, if you read a book about linguistics and their version of English, it follows strict grammatical rules, just like "Standard" English. The John, Mary, and I error is another thing that I would opine is inexcusable, but it's not as bad as messing up "there/their" and "your/you're" in my mind. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5517 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 212 of 221 23 April 2013 at 7:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Note that this rule works fine in standard English, but will give you a horribly incorrect answer in French. Here's the French version, as best as I understand the rules (corrections welcome, of course):
As I understand it, this happens because je works less like a standalone word, and more like a clitic verb prefix. As soon as you have anything but a simple subject, you need to switch from je to moi. Standard, written English follows the rules explained by luke, which are similar to the rules used by Germanic languages. By spoken English is a mess, because sometimes it uses German-style pronouns, sometimes it uses French-style pronouns, and sometimes it uses weird hypercorrections like between you and I. As always, non-native speakers are advised to use the standard rule when writing. In speech, it's a question of who you live with, what context you're speaking in, and who you want to sound like. In French, I go to great trouble to speak like my friends who grew up in northern France and went to university in Paris. That's who I identify with, and that's the closest approximation to who I'd be if I were French. This means that I sometimes say things like, "Ça, c'est ton truc à toi" (roughly: "That's yours / your very own"). This certainly isn't standard written French, but it's how my French friends speak to children. But if I write a formal letter, I'm all, "Je vous prie d'agréer, Monsieur le Directeur, l'expression de mes sentiments distingués," because that's what my friends do on those rare occasions when they need to be formal. Moses McCormick seems to identify as a just a friendly, informal guy. So it's no surprise that he might prefer to sound like "just one of the guys" and ignore the formal register. If this is the case, the right way to evaluate his skills is by those criteria: does he sound like "just one of the guys" in his target languages? Does he talk the way natives would talk with the friends in a pub, for example? This can actually be a very hard register to master. As for his courses, well, I haven't seen them, but it sounds a bit weird to claim you speak "between 45 and 50 languages" (which obviously implies lots of A1 and A2 languages, even for the most gifted polyglot) and then offer paid classes in lots of languages. Of course, if he actually got students enthusiastic about learning a language and got them headed in vaguely the right direction, then it might not matter if his skill level in a given language was really low. Edited by emk on 23 April 2013 at 7:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| casamata Senior Member Joined 4247 days ago 237 posts - 377 votes Studies: Portuguese | Message 213 of 221 23 April 2013 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Hmm, the issue is that if you watch the youtube grammar videos (at least in Spanish, the only language i can evaluate), he is trying to write formally and makes a LOT of mistakes. But it is not a matter of speaking informally, it is just wrong. Informal speech is still very grammatically correct, in general, and no native or advanced speaker would ever speak like that. The mistakes are basic and the pronunciation doesn't follow the rules that any 1st semester student would know. Errors like gender and imperfect/preterite (verbal tenses), conjugations, stuff that even a very informal, speaking native will never get wrong. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4518 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 214 of 221 24 April 2013 at 1:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
My grammar is horrible, but isn't the correct rule simply that in English, like in German, the verb 'to be' takes the nomative case, as there is seen to be an equivalence between the subject and the object of the sentence? So 'Ich bin ich' is correct, rather than 'Ich bin mich', and likewise 'I am I' is correct, rather than 'I am me'. Edited by patrickwilken on 24 April 2013 at 2:16am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Budz Octoglot Senior Member Australia languagepump.com Joined 6358 days ago 118 posts - 171 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Cantonese, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Persian, Hungarian, Kazakh, Swahili, Vietnamese, Polish | Message 215 of 221 24 April 2013 at 5:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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and there is a tendency for some people to use 'myself' in many cases as it was drummed into us at school... 'and I, and I, and I...' so they can't bear to use the word 'me'... so they use 'myself' instead... but when you think about it, it sounds so stupid...
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| morinkhuur Triglot Groupie Germany Joined 4662 days ago 79 posts - 157 votes Speaks: German*, Latin, English Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Maghribi) | Message 216 of 221 24 April 2013 at 10:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Please don't make general statements about which opinions are fine to have for language learner and which aren't when you're really only talking about yourself.
Yes, this is what I meant, those variations are not grammatically incorrect, as some people tend to think, they are simply used in a different social environment. Of course it's still important to know when and where to use a certain variety. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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