Re: pronunciation and general american-english

"Lars Enderin" <lars.enderin@xxxxxxxxx> skrev i meddelelsen
news:497902A7.60906@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Did you claim to teach English to Danes, and have a degree
in English? It worries me a little that you make so many
errors, especially confusing adjectives with adverbs.

You are quite right - I do make a lot of mistakes when I
write in this group as I rarely proof-read what I write. Not
being a native speaker, it is not unknown that one might make
mistakes in grammar and spelling when the aim is to be
understood rather than trying to be considered a perfect
person in the field of the foreign language in question.

I hope that your worries become diminished when I tell you
that I usually proof-read my assignments when I am heading for
the examinations and when I am teaching.

But perfect I will never be. And to be sure that you
understand why, I can tell you that I have just started to
read English grammar seriously about 3 years ago at
university. I am in the age of 58 with English knowledge for
more than about four decades, I have a lot of errors I have to
correct and a great deal of "old habbits" to change before I
come even close to being average.

If I had had English teachers when I began learning English
who were native speakers and who knew their grammar better, I
might have acquired a better command of the English tongue. So
I humbly bower my head and admit that I am far from being
perfect, even if I try my very best. :-)

A thing you might consider here is that the grammar of English
is very difficult and can be confusing, especially when
dealing with adjectives and adverbs. I shall try to explain
what I mean here:

Adverbs are characterised by their syntax, their morphology
and their semantics.

A nonnative speaker might be confused with all of them as
adverbs appear as heads of simple and complex adverbial
phrases, and these may have syntactic functions.

Adverbs are furthermore used to form multi-word verbs e.g.
phrasal verbs like "bring about", come across, give in, call
off, go on, bring up etc. This is not easy for a nonnative
speaker to come about.

In some cases we find different meanings of adverbs than we
expect:

Hard - hardly, late -lately - just -justify -most- mostly

We may have literal versus figurative meaning: The bare form
has literal meaning wheras the form with -ly has figuratively
meaning:

Cheap/dear , cheaply/dearly, fair/fairly, high/highly, pretty
prettily, wide/widely etc.

There are also stylistic differences: The bare adverb form is
used colloquially whereas the form with -ly is used in more
formal English:

Easy: Take it easy. It is easier said than done.
Quick: Come quick! I'll go as quick as I can.
Slow: Go slow, it's slippery! Drive slow here.

Finally, colloquial American English has a few forms
without -ly:

awful: It was awful nice of him. British English has awfully.
real: It was real good. It would have been real bad news. The
baby is real cute. British English has really.
good: It worked out good in the endl They fought real good.
BrE has well.

So it is understandable that a nonnative speaker make mistakes
in the field of adjectives and adverbs, don't you think?

Danes often find it difficult to choose correctly between
adjectives and adverbs in English, and this may result in
incorrect structures like "the traditionally form", "my
ultimately dream".

One of the reasons for these problems may have to do with the
fact that in Danish adjectives and adverbs are very often
identical in form: Det var et langsomt tog (it was a slow
train) - Toget kørte langsomt (the train was moving slowly).
Typically a Danish advers ends with -t, but so does an
adjective that modifies a neuter noun as in "et langsomt tog"
(a slow train) , "et stort bord" (A big table).

Note that in Danish an adjective is changed in the plural:
"Toget er langsomt. Togene er langsomme" wheras adverbs
always have the same form:
"Toget kørte langsomt. Togene kørte langsomt" (It was a slowly
train. (or "The train was a slowly one).

Since we usually have different forms in English, it is
important to distinguis between adjective and adverb, and we
do this by looking at the function of the problem word for
adjectives and adverbs. This is, however, very difficult to
remember all the time.

So you now probably know what we are up against :-)



.

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