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Post by Peter

Debating Grammar Pt. 1: What is Grammar?

February 15th, 2009 | 3 Comments

I feel like I’m about to open up a Pandora’s box of philosophical and linguistic debate with this post. I will try to stay away from existentialism, since the meaning of life is not the point of this blog. But I felt the need as a linguist to stand up for grammar, especially after reading this post.

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Post by Yvonne

Six Sentences in Chinese

February 14th, 2009 | 3 Comments

Many of the language blogs I’ve found in the last few weeks have discussed Tim Ferriss’s “How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour”. He provides six-plus-two illustrative sentences that will help you tease apart the basic structure of a language in a short period of time.

  1. The apple is red.
  2. It is John’s apple.
  3. I give John the apple.
  4. We give him the apple.
  5. He gives it to John.
  6. She gives it to him.

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Post by Yvonne

This Just Sounds Wrong

January 30th, 2009 | 4 Comments

An internet friend of mine once memorably said:

Americans waste their time focusing on verb conjugation. Once you have a feel for how things sound, you’ll know when to use the right form of the verb. I can always tell if someone learned HS spanish or if they learned street spanish because the HS spanish person says things that have not been used since Ferdinand wrote Cristobal Colon a cheque to buy three boats.

I’m up to Lesson 10 of Beginning Chinese Reader and while it’s been fantastic for refreshing me on characters that I once learned and forgot and teaching me new compounds, if you actually used the sentence constructions that appear in some of the readings, you would sound kind of like a Chinese Yoda.

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