Intermediate, advanced students and new teachers, try this:

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 12:25 pm

Intermediate, advanced students and new teachers, try this Internet grammar:

http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/ ... index.html

LarryLatham · Post by **LarryLatham** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 5:34 pm

I guess I'll have to confess to not being as far along with my English as I had thought.

Larry Latham

P.S. I didn't get very far before I found it confusing and somewhat hard to follow. I kept wanting to interupt to say, "But wait..." However, that's not allowed.

That said, the website has a lot to be praised for. There are some innovations that I like. The general approach is interesting. Needs some tuning up though.

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 6:06 pm

LarryLatham wrote:I guess I'll have to confess to not being as far along with my English as I had thought.

Larry Latham

P.S. I didn't get very far before I found it confusing and somewhat hard to follow. I kept wanting to interupt to say, "But wait..." However, that's not allowed.

That said, the website has a lot to be praised for. There are some innovations that I like. The general approach is interesting. Needs some tuning up though.

I kept wanting to interupt to say, "But wait..." However, that's not allowed.

Could you give an example as to where?

LarryLatham · Post by **LarryLatham** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 6:28 pm

Larry Latham

LarryLatham · Post by **LarryLatham** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 6:40 pm

OK, M56

, in the Tenses and Aspects introduction on "Talking about the Future", in the explanation section, we run into this statement:

The choice of which form to use does NOT usually depend on the distance of the future events (although there are a few exceptions to this, which we will discuss), but on how certain you are that they will happen - and to some extent on the kind of reasons you have for this certainty.

I want to say, "But wait, the first part of that is true (although I'm waiting, skeptically, to see what 'exceptions' they plan to trot out), but the second part is not." I agree that the choice of form does not depend on the distance of the future event. I do not agree that there can be any distinction on how certain you might be that the event will happen. That's a recipe for a conundrum: how certain do you have to be to use any particular form? Forty percent? 50-50? Seventy percent?

There are other problems as well, but that one will give you an example.

Larry Latham

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Wed Dec 22, 2004 6:51 pm

Only some quibbles about the placement test:

I couldn't see much difference between "couldn't" and "wasn't able to" in one question, where I would have put "haven't been able to" anyway. There was a "cease" with a verb+ing in the TOEFL type "one of the underlined bits is wrong" section that I couldn't see much wrong with. And there was a comprehension question that I knew the answer to without reading the text.

Anyway these may be hard to find because when I started again, to review the exact questions that I had taken such exception to, it was unnerving to discover that the placement test had changed.

I'm delighted to find that I'm an advanced student.

LarryLatham · Post by **LarryLatham** » Thu Dec 23, 2004 5:00 am

Although Metal56's web site was interesting, while playing around with it I found what I consider to be a much more interesting and innovative one here:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/home.htm

Try it out and see what you think.

Larry Latham

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Intermediate, advanced students and new teachers, try this:

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