Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Easter Clark]

[Fishead soup]

My motto " English is boring and difficult"

[branchsnapper]

To me, it seems rather unlikely that the student was philosophizing about the relative difficulty of English compared with other tongues.

Verbs and adjectives often change their meaning due to the preposition they are used with. These collocations have to be learned to some extent, there's no point fussing too much about why, teacher, why, but as Privateer said, there are often helpful guidelines if you think of the general meaning of the preposition.

[santafly]

I just say:

English is not Math, there is no reason why.

Then they respond: what is math.....

[Tobias]

[Fredbob]

My two cents, I think the student is somewhat directly translating from Korean, xchiyo, (x is the final verb in a sentence), it's a kind of limiter which is used very frequently in order to avoid seeming "arrogant", like when posters use IMHO. Rather than baffle a student with grammatical explanations, I would tell them that the "I think" or "in my opinion aspect" of their sentence is understood without it being stated. so,

English is hard.
Said in English to a native, we assume you are talking about yourself and not comparing yourself to other people.

Said in English to another Korean, assuming neither are bi-cultural or fluent, would likely be missunderstood as arrogance or a statement meant to imply it is difficult for everyone.

Said in Korean, to another Korean, I'm pretty sure that they would add some kind of limiter like -chiyo if they were speaking within the context of the appropriate relationship.


Unless they are trying to make some comparison or are going to continue the discussion with ideas, which would likely point them to the correct preposition.

Many intermediate and advanced learners seem to display this trait, they try to include all the actual words they use in Korean in their English translation, because they are translating, not thinking in English. IMHO

[branchsnapper]

Yes, they are probably translating that way (from habit more than due to thought crime I suspect) but all you need to know/explain is that different languages use different prepositions (to the extent that they have similar ones anyway) for the same kind of idea. Getting the right collocations down is really hard.

(Hard for me! For everyone! What's the big deal with interpreting that?)

[poet13]

Thuida? Thuida? Are you there Thuida?

[bodybydada]

[bassexpander]

[antoniothegreat]

this isnt a technical answer...
but
when i think about it. "to" is used sometimes like that as to show an action done to something. like "she is bad to me" that means her actions towards me, it is active. "for" is just a preposition. when you say english is hard for me, the english is not acting upon me. the person is still the thing that might act, it does not receive.

i hope that mad talk made sense...

i also like what suwon said, which doesnt answer your question. memorize the prepositions with the verb.

[travelhappy]

Here are some ideas why I would say the sentence "English is very hard to me" is incorrect.

1) "to" is an agent preposition, usually used after a Verb or Noun, while "very hard" is an Degree Adverb and Adjective.

2) Even if the sentence employed "for me" instead, this sentence is considered passive, and therefore an active sentence would be more appropriate. ex. I think English is very hard.

[sojusucks]

The OP is fighting a difficult battle. The English taught here is antiquated and often incorrect.

Choose your battles carefully because you will have to hammer it in for a long time before most of the students will fix their mistakes, but then they also have to remember the incorrect method to pass the test.

It's not an easy job: teaching English in Korea.