讯息： 60
语言: English
Vestitor (显示个人资料) 2015年11月23日下午11:44:43
I suspect that there are dozens of beginners who would do better to just read the 6-page grammar summary at the front of Wells's dictionary and then to just read a lot and try and get a 'feel' for usage rather than waffling about 'participle' this and 'perfect tense' that. Same for rote learning of correlatives and lists of affixes without context.
Perhaps there would be fewer and shorter threads..?
erinja (显示个人资料) 2015年11月24日上午1:52:12
For beginners who know grammatical vocabulary, it might be faster to explain this with a technical term, and for a beginner without that vocabulary, it might require examples and more detailed explanations, but you seldom really know who you're talking to on the internet, and as you know, the explanation frequently includes both of these variants.
Vestitor (显示个人资料) 2015年11月24日下午6:36:43
erinja:It isn't obvious to me, sorry. Beginner questions seldom lead to a straightforward response. If a beginner comes in with a sentence like "Mi estas iras kun vin", and wants to know whether this is correct, then the beginner needs to know not only that the correct sentence is "Mi iras kun vi", but also that Esperanto seldom makes use of progressive tenses like English does...Isn't it probably best to give a little which is correct and which people can work with, rather than piling on all the options at once? I ask as a question, but I think the answer is: yes.
RiotNrrd (显示个人资料) 2015年11月24日下午7:48:06
Vestitor:Isn't it probably best to give a little which is correct and which people can work with, rather than piling on all the options at once?People strongly educated in grammar would probably say no. Everyone else would probably say yes.
Vestitor (显示个人资料) 2015年11月24日下午7:56:59
RiotNrrd:Really? I'm sure you're counting yourself among the former and me among the latter too? Rather transparent.Vestitor:Isn't it probably best to give a little which is correct and which people can work with, rather than piling on all the options at once?People strongly educated in grammar would probably say no. Everyone else would probably say yes.
The matter at hand (if you're reading closely) is that not everyone will master grammar to the level of the usual grammar-nerds, so there has to be a real-world, everyday alternative.
RiotNrrd (显示个人资料) 2015年11月24日下午8:14:19
erinja:What exactly do you mean by top-heavy reliance on grammar, and in your mind, what would constitute going lighter on grammar?Sometimes rules of thumb are better than detailed technical explanations. People who are into the "why" of the ways a language is put together tend to be interested in technical explanations. People who are interested in the "how" are sometimes less so.
There's room for both, but often explanations given to beginners fall into the first camp, and you start seeing talk about cases, moods, tones, perfect tenses, the subjuntive, predicates, blah blah blah. Depending on who you are talking to, those sorts of explanations can discourage people rather than encourage them; it can scare them off, if you will.
This isn't a call to "dumb down" anything. I think technical, detailed grammatical explanations have their place, but sometimes the same information can be provided in practical form in a more simplified manner. For beginners I think that that can be fairly important.
To some extent, I think Bertilo tried to address this in the PMEG by throwing out "normal" grammar terms and defining everything in terms of a-vortoj, o-vortoj, etc.
erinja (显示个人资料) 2015年11月24日下午10:37:45
I suspect that private explanations given to a beginner, as part of the tutoring in a course, for example, are not normally as technical as some of the public discussions.
bartlett22183 (显示个人资料) 2015年11月25日下午7:18:06
Similarly, Esperanto is not simply relexified English. It is a separate language with its own grammar and, dare I say, "genius." It will do beginners no good to pretend otherwise. They need to be taught the correct ways of saying/writing things from the beginning. Yes, this may not mean piling on grammatical rules with technical vocabulary with which the beginners may not be familiar, but examples and gentle correction can go a long way.