A language learners’ forum

romeo.alpha wrote:

Cainntear wrote:
The meaning is obscured, because unless you explain in a language they understand (which is certainly not part of TPR) there is no way the students can know that you're telling them a narrative tense and not a confusingly different form of the imperative. Even if they do manage to intuit somehow that it's a narrative tense, there's no way for them to know how rare it is in real use.

That has nothing to do with the problem of people using TPR being seen as too rude because they overuse the imperative. They can learn the usage later, and their habit will be to narrate rather than give orders, which means they'll not be perceived as rude.

They'll be perceived as weird.

Look, can we just clarify what the rules of this debating club are? If I'm following you right it goes like this:

I raise an objection.
You move the goal-posts to obviate my objection.
I raise an objection based on where the goal-posts are now.
You reject the objection to the new problem because it's different from my objection before the goal-posts were moved.

Have I got that right?

Cainntear wrote:I raise an objection.
You move the goal-posts to obviate my objection.
I raise an objection based on where the goal-posts are now.
You reject the objection to the new problem because it's different from my objection before the goal-posts were moved.

Have I got that right?

No, it's more like you can't hold more than one thought in your working memory at one time, so you get confused when I say something that's in context with what had been said up-thread, and then blame me for not stating it explicitly each time. And then you think the goal posts are being moved because you can't keep track of what we were originally talking about.