Help me meet Andy Roddick!

[kgb4life]

Hey guys!

Me and my Japanese friend entered a video contest on ESPN.

The video contest is.... we have to send a video that imitates a great sports moment in history.
If we win the contest, we can meet Andy Roddick and play a match with him in Florida while he uses a frying pan.

Well, the best news is..... our video made it to the final 4!

I hope that all of you can take the little spare time you have in your 24 hour day and take 5 minutes tops to register and vote for our video.

This is my one chance in my life to meet him.

Here is the link: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=3536968#

Our video is the third one (Charlie Lee)
Please vote for that one! The vote is the "click here" link in the text.
It will ask you to register, but I would thank you so much for all of your votes!

This is my only chance in my life! If you can all just take a little spare time from your day to do this for us, 5 people's life dreams will come true!

Please vote for us! Thanks!

[chikara]

... Me and my Japanese friend entered a video contest on ESPN. ......

This thread may interest you

[kgb4life]

what's so special in that thread?

[kgb4life]

oh i got it, lol. u have to be asian to notice such a mistake, lol

[Harisenbon]

oh i got it, lol. u have to be asian to notice such a mistake, lol

And yet, Chikara is not asian.

[chikara]

And yet, Chikara is not asian.

Yes I am, I'm "Austral-Asian"

[AJBryant]

oh i got it, lol. u have to be asian to notice such a mistake, lol

No, just a high school graduate.


Tony

[Harisenbon]

No, just a high school graduate.

Phft. My school drilled that into me during 6th grade.
Of course, I *still* can't diagram a sentence to save my life.

[Yudan Taiteki]

Phft. My school drilled that into me during 6th grade.
Of course, I *still* can't diagram a sentence to save my life.

This is what I think is so wrong about English education in primary school -- focus on niggling pet peeves at the expense of actual grammar teaching.

(Although I suppose you have to be careful, because if the actual grammar teaching is *too* extensive then they might be tempted to continue using "me and my friend". )

[two_heads_talking]

Me and my... vs My friend and I .. how does knowing this have anything to do with being asian? Yes, I am being a pain here.. But I fail to see where the OP even came up with the "you must be asian to see that" comment.

[AJBryant]

No, just a high school graduate.

Phft. My school drilled that into me during 6th grade.
Of course, I *still* can't diagram a sentence to save my life.

Well, yeah, but you have to cut people more slack these days. Pretty soon it'll only be college... And even there, holy crap. When I was in grad school, I heard undergrads saying "him and me" all the time. Made me want to smack heads.


Tony

[Yudan Taiteki]

It's pretty clear that the Latinate "case" system is not really how English works, but even linguists haven't quite figured out yet what is going on. And if linguists can't figure it out, it's unlikely to trickle down to the primary education system. Word position in the sentence is a big factor, and there's something strange that goes on with compound pronouns (aside from the "him and me" issue, something like "The study was done by John and myself" can sometimes be found even in formal edited prose). There are several books on the issue of pronoun forms in English; I should look at them some time.

What I'd especially like to know is why "ye" disappeared in favor of "you", but "whom" is replaced by "who" rather than the other way around (except in hypercorrection), and all the other "subjective" case pronouns seem to be in no danger of disappearing.

In a wider sense, I think one reason you see highly educated people making such "errors" with abandon is that the state of grammar education is so poor that most native speakers are not even able to analyze their own speech in their native language. In my experience most people cannot correctly identify parts of speech even in simple, everyday constructions. There was a recent incident in Australia where some education reform suggestion had glaring mistakes like calling "set of" in "set of bowls" an adjective, "capable of" in "capable of doing" an adverb, and other things like that.

[two_heads_talking]

Well, with the introduction of whole language study(I blame the hippies of the 70's for this lazy approach to educationm where phonetics was tossed out the window and children were allowed to spell how they thought it was spelled without being marked incorrectly) and the lack of effort in many of the local Public Schools, not to mention the increase of "less educated" teachers mass induction into the Educational system, it's no wonder that kids don't know what's right and wrong.

When I hear a supposed English teacher speaking as if they never went to an English class at all, it just scares me. When I have to re-educate my children after they have been taught, it makes me wonder .. (And then I realize that I am not capable of teaching them as I have forgotten more than their teachers know.)

I don't think it's the linquistics that is the problem but the lack of education of our educators.

[Yudan Taiteki]

But I think the failure of linguistics to make any kind of inroads whatsoever into public education is a big problem. The sheer ignorance of even basic linguistics that most people have is staggering; it's akin to if most of the populace believed in geocentrism or bodily humours. And not only that, but people refuse to even acknowledge that linguistics is important to know, which I do not understand -- it's taken as a given that everyone should learn some math and science, even if they are not going to be mathematicians or scientists. But even though everyone uses language constantly, every day, even the basics of linguistics are either not taught in schools or taught incorrectly.

The part of speech issue, just to return to it again, it one of the clear indicators -- assigning parts of speech to words is a basic linguistic skill, and yet most people don't even know what a part of speech is or how you assign one (the common misconception that parts of speech are related to word meanings is a misconception that I think has serious effects on studying foreign languages). It should not be that hard to teach young native speakers of English to analyze the language they already know. Even linguistic keywords/jargon like "bound variable" and "determiner" shouldn't be that hard because all native speakers of English know what these things are, they just don't know the terms for them, and may not be consciously aware of their existence.

In my teaching I see stuff like this all the time; I'm dismayed by college-age native speakers of English who think they do not know the difference between "I had been studying" and "I have been studying" (they know the difference, they just never studied it), and it makes it hard to teach certain grammatical patterns in Japanese when they don't even understand the grammatical explanations of the pattern in their native language.

This is turning into a rant, I guess; this is one of my pet peeves.

[two_heads_talking]

This is turning into a rant, I guess; this is one of my pet peeves.

We all have them. sometimes it helps to just let it out. You know, stand on the mountain and scream at the top of your lungs. Then it's all good for a week or so.. Wash, rinse, repeat.. lol

by the way Chris, is your avatar/forum name anyway connected to this?

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/305151/Yudan-Taiteki/overview