How can a native English speaker with no experience teaching or learning English help, if at all?

Question

I want to answer questions and I know English pretty well. However I don't have experience learning, or teaching, English. Most of my thought process is "that sounds wrong". People say words like infinitive. perfect tense, auxiliary verb, etc. and I have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

It just sounds wrong to me. Those are my only thoughts.

There have been times where I wanted to say something wasn't right, but someone has a very formal explanation of why the phrase is grammatical. I feel like if I would have answered I would have been very downvoted and led the student astray. Even if it sounds wrong, it might still be grammatical.

Can I contribute in a positive way? How can I make sure I don't say anything is wrong, that is technically grammatical? How can I explain why things are wrong? Do I just have to learn all the fancy linguistic words?

Answer 1

The way that I approach this as someone who enjoys language, but probably has a better technical understanding of the construction of software languages than natural languages, is to

• be very aware that my dialect may not be standard English in all cases and to mention that when I'm talking about something sounding awkward or being more common.

• try to find supprting evidence for what I'm saying. Fluent speakers have an advantage when searching, because we have a good idea what the right answer is before we start searching.

• be open to comments on my answer from the rest of the community. If I don't have to edit my answer at least once to add more information or to clarify something, I don't feel like I've completely answered the question.

Answer 2

In general, if you think that something sounds wrong, but you don't want to say much more than that, I'd recommend leaving a comment.

If you want to expound on that some more, however, and leave an answer instead, I recommend supporting your assertion somehow. Fortunately, there are several ways to do that, even if you are a little uncomfortable trying to explain something like “how the progressive participle works in the second person singular.” For example, you can:

• use ngrams to show usage trends
• search corpora to find examples in literature or news articles
• analyze dictionaries to bolster your answer with an authoritative source

One other word of advice: Be careful when using such tools. Learn their limitations. Just because you can find something on the web doesn't mean that it's good English (which is why I focus more on published works). Because so many words have multiple meanings, an ngram doesn't always tell the full story.

It's fun to do a little detective work and find ways support your initial idea. And every once in a while – as inconceivable as this may sound – you might learn through your research: “I don't think that word means what you think it means.”

Answer 3

I've been there!. First, read this post of mine which I had posted in March 2014. Take some time thinking on it.

Do you see the frustration I had in my mind then? I completely understand your concern when you are sincere in learning English but then native speakers downvote your answer or simply say 'that sounds wrong/down'.

Yes, we have to accept that the way native speakers explain, it is a bit difficult for us to convey our message. Trust me, most of the answers from StoneyB's still make my head spin. But then, it is not always that you need to explain your answer the way linguists do. What all you need is a clear way to express yourself without getting into ambiguity.

But then, you certainly require jargon. Why? Because if you want to convey your message without what you call a fancy name, it'd be restricted to that example and you won't be able to explain it in general.

If there's a jargon, there's a reason behind it'

How you do? - is it a question? NO! Because you need an 'extra 'do'' there. How do you explain it without using the jargon?

How you do? - it's not a question because to form a question, you need an auxiliary verb. 'do' is an auxiliary verb there.

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For instance, how would you answer this if someone asks whether this question is correct?

Would you mind to help me?

Now, this question is incorrect. But without jargon or using a fancy name you simply cannot answer it. The asker wants to know why it is incorrect. Even if you know the answer you may simply say...

I think 'Would you mind helping me?' sounds correct to me.

How would you justify this? Is there any rule or the users just have to believe you because you know English? So, you need to explain it using jargon or what you call 'fancy names!'

Check this answer now:

The question in concern is incorrect. The verbs in English grammar follow certain format called 'verb patterns'. The verb mind is one of the verbs that follow '-ing pattern. So, it should be 'Would you mind help helping me?'

You can learn different verb patterns here.

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What made the difference in your 'vague' answer? The jargon - verb pattern! You decide, which one sounds better and more convincing? Of course, the latter one.

Now, as I said, if you don't have any technical explanation, you don't address the question generally. You'll have to stick to your answer without giving a solid reason. But, by stating 'verb pattern' you cover many such questions. And, the asker would then appreciate learning it. Even visitors will learn many things with that answer 'with jargon', won't they?

Now, how to come out of this? You should be all eyes and ears on each answer answered by native speakers here. And yes, why just native speakers? Users like Damkerng, MAR, oerkelens, and a few more are no less than native speakers. Check their answers and you'll know that.

It has been over a year for me. Slowly but steadily I understood that how ELL works. Yes, at times, downvotes with no comments or simply natives telling you 'it sounds off' may frustrate you but you need to take it positively. It is their way to 'express themselves' and I don't think they do it with any ill intentions.

There have been times where I wanted to say something wasn't right, but someone has a very formal explanation of why the phrase is grammatical.

Exactly, learn from that answer and try to find other questions similar to it or having the same tags. Try to explain in your words only after learning the 'real' English. Did you do that in the example I wrote about '...would you mind?'

So, to answer this, keep only one thin in your mind - whatever happens here is positive and you need to learn from it. If they say 'sounds off to us', ask them further - why? and the answer they (or even others) give would be no less than an English lesson for you!

What I do? I read English grammar books and prepare notes. Such books explain nicely with jargon. And, not all jargon are difficult to learn! Say -'verb patterns'? huh?

+1 from me as you wrote exactly what I felt once! I know what you are going through as a keen learner.

Answer 4

I think the most important thing we can do as native speakers is provide something a grammar book can't, namely to tell what sounds natural and what sounds stilted, contrived, or just "off."

My technique is to try substituting in different words of the same part of speech. E.g. the other day on a question about the definite article , conversation in the comments turned to the following construct:

Variable X is an important part of the function.

in contrast to "The variable x...", which is also valid.

So I asked myself, what about "Variable foo is an important part..." or "Variable numberOfTimesExecuted is an important part..."? The latter sounds very weird to me, the former less so; thus I can infer an informal rule that this construct only "works" with short names. What about "Brand X" or "Person x goes to city y"? Actually they feel like proper nouns to me, but that's not my point here. My point is by changing the sentences around I get a feel for what does and doesn't sound right.

Note that none of this concerns formal grammatical terms, except for very mainstream ones like definite article or proper noun.

Answer 5

The ear of the native speaker IS the gold standard, so if you think it sounds wrong you are right. Of course, there are different dialects, so it is good to mention your dialect.

Grammar is intended to codify the rules we use in language, but because language is so flexible, and we can use shortcuts both at word level and phoneme level, it is hard to get it right - of the thousands of grammars of English none actually works well enough for a computer to parse English (and the automatically parsed corpora like the British National Corpus are full of incorrect parses of the good text, as well as having samples of speech and colloquial text).

Generally errors come about (human and computer) because of sentences getting complex so that resolving the intention is difficult, ambiguity is compounded, and inconsistencies in the expectations arise. So generally the way to explain why something is wrong is to simplify it (get rid of 'and' and 'who' and 'that').

Thus

* me and my brother went ...
√ I went ...
√ We went ...
√ My brother and I went ...

* ... gave my wife and I a free ...
√ ... gave me a free ...
√ ... gave us a free ...
√ ... gave my wife and me a free ...

One of the big problems with/for teachers of English (to first or second language learners) is that it is easy to give simplistic rules (like always say "my brother and I" or "my wife and I"). It is better to give contrastive examples showing like I did above when "and I" is better and when "and me" is better. The "me and" convention is not so much a matter of grammar as politeness - put yourself last.

Of course, you can go too far - there is a lot of complexity in extending the above examples to "my wife and my experience", "both my wife['s] and my jobs", "on behalf of my wife and myself" etc. to take into account the possessive (and complexities of individual jobs vs joint experience). In fact, the same principle of getting rid of "and" complexity allows you bypass this awkwardness in writing, while in speech a repair is often used "my wife and I... our experience".

Answer 6

Two things I recommend against that native speakers sometimes do in these answers:

1. Don't answer pronunciation questions with "eye-spellings:"

   laughter is pronounced laff-tur.

2. Don't use meaningless words when describing pronunciation:

   the "th" in thought is hard but the "th" in either is soft.