Teacher Discussion Forums

I think I start seeing your point, MyDingaling. This reminds me of my next door neighbor who is a Lithuanian teacher. I am getting paranoid of saying anything in front of her, because she always tries to correct my language! And this is not just grammar: either am stressing the word in the wrong pla...

The grammar translation method is one of the few methods that is dangerous to the learners native language. This is mainly due to the constant comparison of the second language to the learners first langauge. Thanks for an interesting post, MyDingaling. Sorry, I could not quite grasp what exactly d...

We should know better...than to post advice when it's asked for?! Or know better than you?! :shock: I'm sure you mean to say the latter...but you have great English, V! I mean: "know better than me", since you are native speakers after all and whatever you say, you are not lost in the translation j...

Thanks both of you. In any case, you should know better.

Sorry to use this forum for the purpose like that, but I am to do an urgent translation from Lithuanian into English and need some native speaker's feedback whether the following sentences sound/do not sound natural for their ear and suggest the possible corrections. Since the actor-creator is at th...

At least for me, non-native speaker mind you, the most natural sounds two thousand and one, two thousand and two etc. Twenty oh one sounds a little strange, I would not use it. Thats what my intuition tells. We will wait for the native speakers to confirm or correct it.

I guess Russia missed it's chance in the age of exploration, before the invention of nuclear weapons complicated land-grabs too much :wink: . I cannot agree with that. Russia (or USSR) was one of the biggest imperialist conquerors in the XX century. And to some extent it remeins so even now, althou...

Can the same be said about Russian. It is also very widely used in almost all the post-USSR countries and even in some east-european countries of the former Communist block. Can we assume that it has reached this "criticall mass" that you mentioned or that it is still a very much politically charged...

Yeah, I know that. But as it was already mentioned, even the writing systems are different: taiwan and hongkong have traditional characters while the communist china have switched to the reformed characters. Thus my previous comment.

What is then a lingua-franca between the different Chinese groups? I mean, when the Chinese people from the Mainland, from Hong Kong, from Taiwan, Macao, Malaisya, Tailand, Indonesia, Singapore and USA meet what is the language and system of writing they most likely use to communicate? English? :lo...

Thanks for replying, Vytenis! Sorry about my writing - sometimes I am ashamed to say it, but I am a native speaker! :oops: Anyway, obviously the Communicative Approach has a lot going for it, and I can understand your faith in it compared to your earlier learning experiences...so, let me put it ano...

I'd like to know, however, if you think the distinction between top-down and bottom-up is really still valid, especially in view of the work done by the COBUILD project etc (which you mention); I myself can see little difference between a student studying words > meanings/uses > contexts/example se...

Thanks both of you for clarification. So then it appears that I would in fact have to learn different spoken/written languages depending where I go: to Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaisia or other Chinese-speaking places: either the Mandarin pronunciation with the simplified writi...

kevinlin1222 wrote:I'm sorry but I don't quite understand what you mean by "changes in the literary standards of Chinese language,"

I have heard there has been a great deal of change in the literary standards of the Chinese language, after Mao came to power. Is that true?

Whoever has been writing the letters ET as & must have been pretty drunk