vanilla Wishlist

[llamabeast]

Hmm. Naughty professor!

[Tifone]

I dunno if Swan is joking or speaking for real, but it's true that here in Italy there's plenty of mediocre professors (not all of them are, of course) that teach you mainly the Elizabethan period and Shakespear's history, in the english classes. In italian. Self-teach or perish!

[Beorne]

Tifone said:
I dunno if Swan is joking or speaking for real, but it's true that here in Italy there's plenty of mediocre professors (not all of them are, of course) that teach you mainly the Elizabethan period and Shakespear's history, in the english classes. In italian. Self-teach or perish!

You're lucky, my english professor did astrology all the time!

[Swan]

im serious. my prof said that grammar is useless because others will understand you anyway and so we did only english topic, like name of things in english, name of people ecc..

[Beorne]

We're doomed ....

[JimMorrison]

Swan said:
im serious. my prof said that grammar is useless because others will understand you anyway and so we did only english topic, like name of things in english, name of people ecc..

He must spend a lot of time in internet chat rooms with American teenagers.

That'll teach anyone to devalue things like grammar, spelling, sentence structure.....

[Gandalf Parker]

Actually I can see the point when teaching a second language.
There is a long way to go between a level where you can be understood, and a level where you are fluent. Spending a lot of time on syntax vs more "words" can be inefficient. The most misunderstandings occur more from lack of thesaurus than from incorrect syntax.

[JimMorrison]

Well that is especially true of modern English I suppose, since we've absorbed more words than we invented. Pretty soon the world will only speak English, not because other languages get forgotten, but because they become incorporated, until everything is just "English". O.o

[Gandalf Parker]

Im often the "translator" in various work environments. Not because I speak languages, but because I know more english than most of my coworkers. The person needing translation is speaking english, but as a second language. They are clear enough to be understood but they often had been taught only one word for each thing. When the english speaker tried to tell them something, the conversation tended to bomb at the first effort with a shrug from the non-native person. The english speaker was unable to re-try their statement waith variations. I was abit of a thesaurus so with a few tries I was usually able to hit the right words to get the point across.