[Vocabulary] Using Except and Except For in a sentence.

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Nicole Huang

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I am a native speaker but now I attend a normal school in Taiwan.
We have lessons created in dialogues, and we are required to memorize the sentences in the lesson dialogue.
Today we had a test and I forgot the correct sentence that came with the dialogue, so I randomly translated it from Mandarin to English.

I wrote:
Everything is fine except for your finger.

The sentence in the dialogue:
Everything is fine except your finger.

I asked the teacher if it was fine adding "for", but he said he didn't think it was appropriate.
I was confused because I remember seeing many of "except for"s used in books.

Please help ><
 

bhaisahab

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I am a native speaker but now I attend a normal school in Taiwan.
We have lessons created in dialogues, and we are required to memorize the sentences in the lesson dialogue.
Today we had a test and I forgot the correct sentence that came with the dialogue, so I randomly translated it from Mandarin to English.

I wrote:
Everything is fine except for your finger.

The sentence in the dialogue:
Everything is fine except your finger.

I asked the teacher if it was fine adding "for", but he said he didn't think it was appropriate.
I was confused because I remember seeing many of "except for"s used in books.

Please help ><

It's fine with or without "for".
 

5jj

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'Except for' is natural before noun phrases.
 

Nicole Huang

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Sep 10, 2013
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Student or Learner
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American English
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United States
Current Location
Taiwan
Thank you both for the help :)
 

konungursvia

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'Except for' is natural before noun phrases.

I find it sounds redundant unless the verb structure accepts that preposition (for).
 
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