|
 |
Error equivalent | ||
Tags: Error | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| HMS Senior Member England Joined 4907 days ago 143 posts - 256 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 10 04 December 2011 at 2:59am | IP Logged | |||||
|
My native language is English. Verbally I consider myself quite well spoken but I am
not familiar with the grammatical definitions and terms that form the language - I just know what 'sounds right'. This poses a problem for me in language learning, almost every language product assumes littoral grammatical proficiency in the target language. How can I comprehend the German dative case (or whatever...) If I do not know the equivalent in my own language? My question, regarding any language anybody who answers cares to use as an example: What is the margin for error in your language? If a learner used incorrect gender or case ending would it be unintelligible or just regarded as "broken" Can anyone offer me an example of an error and it's equivalent in English? Thanks in anticipation. Edited by HMS on 04 December 2011 at 3:00am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Darya0Khoshki Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4868 days ago 71 posts - 91 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Iraqi) Studies: Persian | Message 2 of 10 04 December 2011 at 4:05am | IP Logged | |||||
|
I'm not sure if this answers your question or not ... but from teaching ESL here are some of the really common (and more egregious) mistakes that I heard where people broke a specific grammaticla rule:
"I am go to the home." (using the 'am/is/are' without the 'ing', adding extra 'thes' and 'to'). "That's mean." (instead of 'that means'). "He study every day." (not putting 's' on the end of the present tense verb for he/she/it). "Why you are here?" (word order in making questions). When Kurds speak Arabic, a common mistake they make is not conjugating their verbs properly, for example using masculine verbs instead of feminine or singular instead of plural. So in all these cases, they're intelligible but come across not seeming very accomplished in the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4665 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 10 04 December 2011 at 8:12am | IP Logged | |||||
|
Native English speakers from less educated rural areas of the U.S. often do not use the right pronoun cases, using accusative instead of nominative, for example: "Them dogs..." (accusative) instead of "Those dogs...". In my part of rural Oregon I hear sentences like "Them dogs is real mean." all the time. Wrong pronoun case AND wrong verb person/number agreement.
With foreign speakers I often hear subtly wrong verb tenses, like simple present for present continuous: "I go home." or "I will go home." where "I'm going home." would be more correct. Unless the errors are really bizarre or use the wrong verbs or nouns the sentences are usually perfectly understandable, but it's obvious that the person is still learning English. In other cases if the word order get scrambled up, because English depends more heavily on word order than many other languages, it won't seem to make any sense at all. (E.g. from an R-rated Japanese movie: "The picture and minority for adults have information including an unsuitable expression. Therefore, I forbid firmly perusal of the direction with which 18 years old is not filled.") I can see how wrong noun cases would make a sentence very hard to understand because the listener wouldn't know if the noun in question was supposed to the subject, or direct object or indirect object or what. But it seems to me that even if one doesn't know the technical terms one can still read translations of sample sentences and get a feel for what does what in the language. If I want to know what the verb tense in a particular Spanish sentence means I don't look for the technical description of the tense. I look for a translation of the same verb or a similar verb in the same tense. As long as I know it means "I was running..." I don't really care what the technical name is for that tense. --gary 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6239 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 10 04 December 2011 at 10:42am | IP Logged | |||||
The "margin of error" depends both on the language and the sentence. Most errors will just sound odd; some will cause confusion. To take Esperanto for an example: if you leave out the accusative entirely, a sentence sounds broken. If you mix up the nominative and accusative, you'll become actively confusing: instead of saying "the dog chases the cat", you would say something meaning "the cat chases the dog", for instance. Similarly, in Italian, if you mix up which person you're conjugating for, and say "parli con te" instead of "parlo con te", you're suddenly saying "you speak with you(rself)" instead of "I speak with you". Confusing or broken? Depends on who you're talking to and the context, but it's not good. A little bit of grammatical terminology will help you a lot with language learning. Here are a couple of articles on the dative: Grammar primer part 2: Dative and Genitive Case and The Four German Cases: dative. Both give English examples - while English doesn't change nouns with case inflections for the dative, it's easy to find English sentences which correspond to, say, German ones where the dative would be used, and show which part of each sentence would use the dative in German. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| HMS Senior Member England Joined 4907 days ago 143 posts - 256 votes Speaks: English* | Message 5 of 10 04 December 2011 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
Thanks! I find those links very helpful.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6397 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 10 04 December 2011 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
As a native speaker of Russian i see a clear distinction between morphological errors and other errors. when you form a word incorrectly, it's always wrong; when you use the wrong form, it's something natives also do when they decide to put something differently but they've already started the sentence.
purely subjectively, i consider someone's skills in a language better if all the morphological forms they use are correct, even if there are syntactic and other mistakes. especially, no matter how fluently someone can babble in Finnish, i won't admit they're better than me unless they make no morphological errors. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4709 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 7 of 10 04 December 2011 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
I don't know what language(s) you study, but there's a book called "English Grammar for Students of French" which has gotten very good reviews on Amazon. Here's the link.
EDIT: since you're in the UK, here's the link on Amazon.co.uk. Edited by Jeffers on 04 December 2011 at 8:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5811 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 10 04 December 2011 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
I wouldn't call that "wrong", I'd call that the inevitable consequence of the loss of noun declension in English. The current standard represents an unstable state, as you can see from the "he and I" vs "me and him" debate. It may not be standard usage, but it's certainly not an "error", and it's not what the OP was asking about when he started this thread. Now, going back to the original question.
The classic one would be dropping verb tenses altogether and saying "I go there yesterday." "I go there now." "I go there tomorrow." Now that seems clear enough, and it seems to be a forgivable error, but if you try to get any more complicated... "I already go there when he ask me to go." instead of "I had already been there when he asked me to go." All languages are error-tolerant at every level, but errors compound each other when they co-occur. Half-a-dozen "unimportant" errors occurring within a few words of each other can render an entire sentence unintelligible, so there's no way to place an accurate value on the seriousness of most errors. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
