Once I had to give low beginning German lessons to an American engineer at a German company. One day he said something to his boss (the German CEO) in German, and the boss told him he had said it absolutely wrong. We teachers had taught him that in absolutely “incorrect” German.
Confused, the engineer goes back to his office, opens up his textbook – published in Germany by Hueber Verlag, so very good – and there was the phrase exactly as we had taught it to him.
He took the book to his boss and showed him the phrase. The German boss said something like, “Oh! I didn’t know it could be said that way!”
So bosses can do this not only with foreign languages, but with their own native languages, as well.
Of course, they are correct most of the time. Nobody is going to question their expertise. That isn’t what I’m trying to do. What I meant was that it is wrong to think English trainers never make mistakes. They do. All human beings make mistakes sometimes, don’t you think?
That’s obviously what we ought to do and what many people would do. Students should be encouraged to use works of reference on their own.
True. Some people could, however, hire an English trainer so as to improve their grammar and pronunciation skills, for instance, although their knowledge of another aspect of English such as medical English might be excellent. Would you fault the student for enlightening his or her trainer when he or she makes mistakes with medical English terminology?
What exactly is the point you want to make? You say:
Such a comment hardly adds anything to what is being discussed, does it? A teacher is a fallible guide and is clearly ready to admit having made a mistake, when required.
As I said previously I can’t understand your suggestion that everything should be questioned by a student, almost as if you are suggesting this is required practice.
I suppose this depends quite a lot on the subject being studied. If someone studies philosophy or theology, or even history or psychology, there will be many more things you might like to question than there will be when you are studying English as a second language. Certainly you don’t mean we should blindly accept everything a teacher tells us as being true? Even the English language has its “loopholes”.
Please don’t misinterpret what I have written. We were talking about teaching English, weren’t we? There is no question of ‘blindly accepting’ anything. I merely pointed out the problems that would arise in class if every student were to question every explanation given by the teacher.
Hi Jamie, I think this example shows that many CEO’s need some basic training in how to deal with people. Your engineer was learning German because he wanted to improve communication with his German management. Now, his boss told him that he was taught an ‘absolute incorrect’ phrase in German (which obviously wasn’t the case.) If that phrase hadn’t been ‘correct’ he could have found many ways of communicating that to his employee. Instead he chose the worst option.[YSaerTTEW443543]
But just the fact that you can do it is weird, and it means there is some kind of illogic in the language that has to be compensated for.
Okay, but you need the context to know if “hacer” means that someone is producing something or just engaging in an action. In English, the choice of the verb usually tells you which sort of activity is being engaged in, so you can walk in on the middle of a conversation and half way know what is going on.
It wasn’t from a joke. It was from a newspaper article, and three different native Spanish speakers gave me three different interpretations of what the pronoun “su” meant, and they couldn’t even agree on the number.
“Llevo a mi novia a la fiesta.” That’s an illogical sentence, because the person is using the same preposition for two different objects, in one case it has no purpose at all, and in the other it means “to”.
Anyway, my point was to bring up that Spanish is just as wildly illogical as English, and in many cases containes nonsensical and redundant words and phrases. Your students’ criticisms of the “illogic” of English apply to their own language, in which a table has to be talked about as if it were a woman.
Your frequent logical fallacy, in quite a few threads, has been that if any human being can ever be wrong, then everything anybody ever says is up for grabs.
Oh, they definitely do have other authorities that they use as sources, usually whatever authority reinforces their mistake. I have had several students get upset when I coach them on the proper pronunciation of the word “clothes”, because, “My teacher in Germany said it is pronounced closes!” Some of them believe a non-native-speaking instructor who has never visited an English-speaking country over a native speaker with two or three reference books.
Hi Jamie, the person who thinks that ‘clothes’ is pronounced ‘closes’ is just stubborn and will always have a hard time learning something new. I can’t understand why somebody who wants to learn English refuses to listen to authentic sources such as CNN, DVD’s or audio books. Do you think that a person who has heard the word ‘clothes’ pronounced a hundred times correctly will ever start thinking that ‘clothes’ and ‘closes’ are pronounced the same way? If I want to learn how to play tennis, I watch tennis players in action and try to imitate them. Why do people always try to come up with a short cut to learning a second language?[YSaerTTEW443543]
Ah, but there might be more logic in assigning genders to inanimate things than you think. Have a look at this (which makes me wonder what criterions were used when nouns were first given genders? It could be fun to make our own assumptions):
A hard drive is female, because it remembers everything you’ve ever done wrong, even after you’ve changed, and then blurts it out at you or other people months later during some kind of conflict.
The funny part is that the guy who posted that automatically assumed that I was a “non-academic”. He thought that either because I said I’d had a real job, or because my old e-mail address didn’t end in “edu”, or else because I wrote clearly.
I’d already solved that syntactic conundrum on my own, by the way, and I posted the query just to get confirmation.