Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[Marlen]

Hello native speaker,

Does the following sentence work?

Students might like the quick movement in company of their friends and it would be an excellent training for the personal condition.

Thanks in advance for your help.
Marlen

[timtom]

Gramattically, it is not bad. It should be something like:
Students might like the quick movements in the company of their friends and it would be excellent training for their personal condition.

The sentence still sounds kinda odd though, so here's an alternative sentence that conveys the same idea:
Students may enjoy the fast-paced action with their friends and table tennis promotes excellent personal fitness.
This sentence is still a little weird though because the subject of the first clause is 'students' and the subject of the second clause is 'table tennis,' so it may be better to go with a sentence like:
Along with the benefits of improved physical condition, students will also enjoy the fast-paced action of table tennis with their friends.
This sentence also makes the sentence more confident because
a) It uses a more powerful sentence structure.
b) it uses 'will' instead of 'may'

Oh, and your greeting in your post should probably have an 's' at the end of speaker (because you are adressing all native speakers rather than a single native speaker).

[Marlen]

Thanks a lot for your comprehensive and useful reply. I always find it quite difficult to correct a sentence that looks almost correct grammatically.

[clonc]

Dear Timtom,

Are you a teacher or a student? You do not say so in your profile.

I hope you do not claim to be a teacher, because there were spelling mistakes in your advice, which is a bad thing for a teacher to display when advising a student. (Gramattically, adressing)

And what is this word kinda? I cannot find it in any dictionary. Not a good example to a student, I am sure.

Finally, how does one make a sentence more confident?

[timtom]

I am definitely just a English speaker. (I am a student, but not of lingustics/language... so it doesn't really count for this discussion).

While I agree that the use of the "slang" word kinda (It's a semi-contraction of the words 'kind' and 'of') is not the most appropriate; for your information it does exist in dictionaries. I did a quick google on 'kinda dictionary' and got an instant result from:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/kinda

Even more than I do not claim to be a teacher I do not claim to spell things correctly. I am actually quite amazed that I only managed to make 2 typing mistakes during a post. Some day I plan on installing the spell-checker extension for my browser...

I believe I explained myself on why the sentence was more confident to the best of my ability on a non face-to-face discussion, but I will attempt to elaborate.

Take for example the sentences:
1) When he grows up, Billy may become an astronaut.
2) When he grows up, Billy will become an astronaut.
The first sentence conveys that there exists the probability that Billy will become an astronaut.
The second says that there is no doubt that Billy wishes to become an astronaut.

As for the sentence structure being more confident. I don't know how to describe it. Maybe if I was a linguist I could tell you. But I can tell you that my little native-english brain says that the second suggested sentence in my previous post has a stronger, more confident, form.

[advoca]

[clonc]

Hear hear, advoca.

Well said.

[Boy Rates]

Doesn't anyone care what goes on around here?

Marlen posts a question starting with "Hello Native Speaker"

Some good-hearted guy gives a great answer to her question. She's happy. He's happy. End of story, right?

NOT!

First a guy (who has nothing in his OWN profile) can't resist picking on the native speaker.