August 2003 Archives

I have often heard people saying that English is an easy language to learn. I have also heard that Chinese is the most difficult, and many speakers of languages are proud to say that their language is one of the hardest of all. But is this true? Are some languages harder than others?

Do we always need to backshift the verb in reported speech?

Some argues that where the reporting verb is in the past tense, then we should move the other verbs back a tense automatically.

There is a lot of hostility towards unstressed forms in some circles, where they are regarded as non-standard or 'sloppy' English. However, the learner in an English-speaking country will hear native speakers using all sorts of contractions in their speech. Does this conservative view of English pronunciation help or hinder students?

Critics of language exams often say that they force students to learn an artificial form of standard English that is often at odds with the language used by many native speakers. Is this necessarily a bad thing?

The idea behind descriptivist grammar is that forms that are used by a substantial part of the speech community are accepted and recognised, but the truth is often far from this.