cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (lol yep)
[personal profile] cimorene
Today our totally qualified native speaker!!! Finnish teacher "explained" that what differentiates casual speech from written language is that there "kind of aren't any rules".

SOOOOO, not a linguist then!

She did say she "didn't really like grammar" to me in passing once, which I found difficult to understand. How can you like teaching language, let alone teaching lower-level language to non-native speakers, if you don't like grammar?

But I've noticed sometimes that the syntactical underpinnings of explanations aren't really there. Like, it's completely plausible that they would just confuse many of my classmates, but the difference, for example, between a gerund and a participle is pretty hard to explain without using some version of the concept of "modify", and without comparing the words in question to nouns and adjectives. Not that she doesn't fully undersatnd the nuances of the different forms and modes she teaches, but the way she explains them is almost always a combination of semantics and examples.

She's pretty good at explaining things generally, but it's not in a way that's extremely suited to the way I organize grammar in my brain. Her counterpart who loves grammar, like me, is easier to understand.

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Cimorene

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