Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2006

Probably would. If his guides are Taiwanese grammar teachers, then
I'm afraid that his English will continue to down the sinkhole of
misguided instruction.

I weould like to see some data to back that one up.

Yes, if one can understand it. I find it not only tedious at times,
but difficult to deal with because I don't know all the vocabulary
they use. That means that I have to do a lot more research than a
grammarian with a linguistics PhD does.

I don't care what the native language of the reader. There's far
too much information in Quirk et al. for any normal human to
absorb. I've been using that book for the past twenty years and
haven't found anyone who learned to write or speak English better
because of having read it from cover to cover, and I know a few
Japanese professors of English who not only read it religiously
every night, but one who had actually memorized the damned thing,
and his English, both spoken and written, was unintelligible to his
native anglophone colleagues.

Is there a better approach, in your experience?

No, they speak their native idiolects perfectly, which means that
all the grammatical errors they make in their native languages are
included. I taught illiterate Latin American migrant workers at The
College of Marin back in 1989, and they were, in general, very
eager but very poor students of English.

I think that's a gross overgeneralization. My Japanese did not
improve beyond the strictly survival level until I was charged with
being the liaison between the teachers in my EFL program and the
Japanese-speaking staff at the private high school that hosted the
EFL program. I had to immerse myself in Japanese conversation with
native speakers of Japanese and learn from their corrections. One
cannot learn that language or any other strictly from a grammar
book. Once one is serious about learning the language -- because
one must learn the language -- then one does what one can to
perfect it, and if that means repeating what one has heard on TV,
the radio, or in conversations with others, or, assuming one is
literate, reading idiom and usage texts, or taking constructions
from newspaper and novels and government reports, and using them on
the locals, then that's what one does.

On the other hand, for centuries before there was such a thing as
printing, all kinds of adults learned the foreign languages they
needed to survive simply because that's all they heard. That
doesn't necessarily mean that they spoke like native speakers, of
course, or that they all reached the same level, just that when one
has to learn a language, one does, to the best of one's ability.