6 common grammar myths destroyed | How native speakers use English

[Music] hello and welcome to kangaroo English my name is Christian and today is Tuesday the best day of the week today I am going to be destroying common language myths especially grammar myths and I want to divide these myths into three categories so the first category is myths based on history bad history bad understanding of language the second category is myths based on misunderstanding the psychology of language and the final category is myths based on lies and marketing that is used by people to sell products and sell courses and sell books and sell exams okay so let's look at two myths from the first category so these are myths based on the history of English and the first one is this hi Christian could you please tell us about prepositions at the end of a sentence there are so many students and also teachers who have this idea in their mind that it's wrong to end a sentence in English with a preposition and I think it's useful to try to understand where this myth came from and it probably came from a guy called Joshua Paul who wrote a book about English usage and in the book he wrote this if a phrase seemed hard in English to be turned into Latin turn it into some other English of the like sense and this is typical of the attitude of people at the time so in the past there were scholars and and other educated people who wanted English to be like Latin because Latin was the language of Education and scholarly thought and you know it was the language of royalty right and and so these in the past these people they tried to kind of take English and manipulate it so it would fit into the structure of Latin because Latin was the perfect language but the problem is that English isn't Latin and it doesn't fit in the Latin structure but in Latin you cannot end a sentence with a preposition so this guy this one guy said hey we probably shouldn't do the same thing in English and here we are 400 years later with the same idea in in our heads and this idea has no reason to exist apart from this guy saying it and you'll notice this is a common theme there's just it just takes one person to create this this myth and I'll explain to you why it's it's it's ridiculous so imagine you say to me i sat on whoopee good I'm like I'm sorry I'm sorry can you repeat that you say I sat on a woofer blue-blue and I say I don't understand what you're saying um what did you sit on now this this sentence ends in a preposition what did you sit on now if we follow this rule we follow this rule that we should and a sentence in English with a preposition then what we need to say is on what did you sit now sure you could do this but nobody talks like this if you talked like that people would think that you had some type of you know problem that you'd learnt English you know 500 years ago and so in English it's it's absolutely necessary sometimes to to end a sentence with with a preposition so please understand that that this rule has no basis in reality next question hey mates I've been thinking about phrasal verbs and I have a question in a work environment as a business company for example to talk using phrasal verbs is considered unprofessional or amateurish now again this is a very similar thing this is the idea that there are some types of language some types of grammatical constructions that are formal and other types that are informal and again when we look at the history normally it's just one person saying we shouldn't do this and then this one person generates a lot of influence and here we are hundreds of years later with these ideas in our head that we shouldn't do that and we don't even really know why for example a lot of people think that we shouldn't use the passive the passive is bad where did we get that from the elements of style by Strunk and white again it was just a guy who gave his opinion it's not law that's not how language works and it's the same thing with phrasal verbs people have this idea that phrasal verbs are informal and the Latin single word verbs are more formal now there is not really any evidence that that is true and in fact there are some single words Latin verbs that have no phrasal verb equivalent they can't be substituted and the opposite is true there are some phrasal verbs that have no single word Latin it equivalent we must use the phrasal verb but this doesn't really answer the question about formal and informal so I have this really great this really great research paper here which is by Ken Hyland and Kevin yang and they ask the question is academic writing becoming more formal and what's great about it is in the paper they list 10 things that are considered by some style guides to be informal right and just so you know the passive voice and and phrasal verbs are not on this list ok but the 10 things include for example using first-person pronouns using sentence initial conjunctions using sentence final prepositions listing expressions and direct questions and exclamations now if we look at the list if we look at the general idea of the list there is one definition for formal versus informal and the definition is basically formal language is specific and informal language is vague and if you understand that concept then you understand the difference between formal and informal language formal and informal language isn't really about specific grammatical constructions and specific vocabulary and you know word order no no no no formal language is about being specific so for example one of the things on the list is when you create a list you should not say etc right so imagine I'm writing a scientific paper I don't say well we tested the boys and we tested the girls etc no that's not good enough because in a formal scientific paper we need details we need you to be specific I need to know exactly what you you know what you're listing what you're testing and so that's why that's considered an informal feature and again the same thing first-person pronouns if I'm writing a scientific paper I don't say I tested the the you know the liquid no because we need to be more specific about who it may not be I it might be the team it might be my research associate Maria it might be even more specific than that so it's about being specific that's the difference between formal and informal language now let's look at the next category which is myths based on not understanding the psychology of language and let's look at this question what's the proper order turn on the power of choice or turn the power of choice on now you may or may not know that in English we have these phrasal verbs okay and some of these phrasal verbs we can separate and some of them we can't but if we can separate a phrasal verb it means that we can put the object of the verb here in the middle like in this example we can turn the power of choice on or we can turn on the power of choice and the question is when do we split and when do we not split what's the difference well there's no right and wrong rule there's no right and wrong it's about psychology it's about how we kind of process language so the first thing is that if the object of the verb is very long if it's a very long phrase you know very long construction then we probably don't want to put it in the middle because then the distance the distance between this verb which has one meaning the distance is so big that maybe we forget the meaning of the verb like for example I want you to turn the red switch next to the door which is at the bottom of the stairs on the left of the toilet on what by the time you've finished telling me the object of the verb I've forgotten this meaning so if it's long should probably put it at the end because it's easier for me to process that makes sense right that's logical psychology but there's there's another part of psychology imagine we have a short phrase like like in the example the power of choice now we can put it here or here we have two options but in general in general in English if we bring something to the front okay if we bring it closer to the beginning of the sentence it's more powerful we pay we pay more attention to it we give it more emphasis so psychologically when I'm processing the sentence if you say turn the power of choice on the power of choice is more salient to me my focus my emphasis is on power of choice whereas if you say turn on the power of choice my focus is much more on the process of turning something on on this part simple simple question of psychology and again that's just the way that English works next question which is the right form of future in this situation I didn't pass my English test my parents will not be happy or my parents are not going to be happy will or going to the eternal question about the future now again this isn't a question of right or wrong I don't care what they wrote in your grammar book this isn't about right or wrong this is about psychology so I need to tell you something a little bit kind of crazy about the human brain okay so the past definitely happened right the past is real but the future well the future isn't real we don't know what's going to happen all we can do is make predictions and we live now in the present but there's something really interesting about the human brain which is the past is just as much imagination as the future we think that our memories of the past are so real and perfect and true but actually they're not our brain has to recreate and imagine the past just as much as it has to do for the future in fact there's been some research where they were able to convince people that in the past they had committed a crime even though they hadn't that psychology because your brain can recreate and imagine things that never even happened so really here we are living in the moment and past and future is just imagination the sommes type of matrix world we create in our minds and so when we decide between using will and going to again it's about psychology now these are basically two different types of predictions will is a strong prediction something which you are quite sure is going to happen going to is a prediction based on present evidence it's strongly linked to now it's present continuous so if you say your parents will be angry well I'm making a strong prediction I'm almost 100% sure that your parents are not going to be happy about you failing that exam but when I use going to what I'm doing is I'm saying come here into this moment with me let's look at the evidence let's look at your exam results your parents are not going to be happy because I'm looking at what's happening now and recreating the future so I know that there are lots of grammar books that talk about the difference being decision now you know plans already made versus decision now but if you look at you know corpora of the way that people use the future tense in English there's no rule okay it's all about psychology so don't believe what your grammar book tells you now the final category myths about language based on lies and marketing used to sell products let's look at this one somebody told me that if you can memorize 3000 vocabulary words you will be fluent but what are those words can anyone suggest a good reference for the well-known and common words okay I have to tell you the truth the truth is that you need to know three thousand and three words to be fluent in English if only it was true there is zero correlation between how many words you know and your fluency and my favorite example is the New Zealand Scrabble player Nigel Richards he is a native English speaker lives in New Zealand and he won the French Scrabble championships he memorized the French dictionary memorised it he cannot speak French zero French zero there's no relation between size of vocabulary and fluency why because fluency is a result of practice you need much more than just vocabulary to be fluent you need to have automatic control of the grammar structures that you can then put vocabulary in you need to be able to pronounce the words you know in an understandable way you need to have all of these things be automatic and that only comes from practice but that doesn't mean that the entire question is bad because it is good and useful to have a good vocabulary list that contains high frequency words because zips law tells us that you know the top kind of 1000 words makes up like nine 90% of language so it's a great you know a good word list is a good starting point and there are lots of good word lists especially on poor nations website I will put a link down below in the description box and the final question dear Christian let me make a question when is the best time for a child to start learning English my question is because my daughter is 6 years old but she did not start her first year at standard school I mean she isn't alphabetized yet could be a waste of time to start right now here's the truth the truth is that the best time for anybody to start learning English was the day they were born and the second best time is right now because language ability comes from you know practice so the more years you have a practice the more time you have spent with the language the better your language will be it's a very simple formula but time in years is meaningless for example I could study English for six years and go to class once a month who he's been studying English for six years no it's not really about years it's about how many hours are you spending learning the language and on top of that what type of studying are you doing because I could spend a thousand hours memorizing vocabulary and have zero fluency that would be a bad use of my time bad studying bad pedagogy bad methodology right so there's things that are important good lots of hours and good technique and this myth is based in the kind of idea that children are much better at learning languages than adults it's just not true if you put a child and an adult together and you test them in all of the cognitive areas memory short-term memory working memory problem-solving you know all of these things adults are better than children of course the reason that children are so much more successful at learning a language is because they have no choice right everybody learns their first language because they need it to survive as an adult learning a second language you just don't have the same need you don't have the same pressure it takes a really special adult to devote the time and the energy necessary to learn a language to the same level as a child does because adults are busy with other things you know coffee beer Netflix so I want you to realize that it's never too late adults can also be fantastic at learning languages and if your daughter is six years old that is absolutely not too late to have great language the question is are you and your daughter willing to put in the time necessary and I hope you are because the rewards of speaking a second language are great well I hope you enjoyed this destruction of myths about grammar and language I'm Christian this is kangaroo English and I'll see you in class [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 69,023

Keywords: learning english, learn english, english teacher, english grammar, linguistics, formal and informal english, can use you phrasal verbs in formal english, end a sentence with a preposition, separable and non-separable phrasal verbs, when to separate a phrasal verbs, when to put object in middle of phrasal verb, how many words do you need for fluency, how much vocabulary do you need to be fluent, will or going to, future tense, canguro english, kangaroo english, canguru english

Id: mxN624c-5Hk

Length: 24min 22sec (1462 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2019