Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Cavesa » Sat Mar 03, 2018 1:54 pm

I agree with Tiia and Iversen so much here! Even though it could even make for a whole new thread.

Of course I make mistakes sometimes. But it has happened to me on various occassions to be corrected just because the native didn't know a word like a hospice. Instead, she corrected me, assuming I didn't know the word hôpital. Yes, another proof how the medical education everywhere is failing, when it comes to palliative care. Really, why can't the natives imagine the foreigner knowing more about something and therefore using a word unknown to them, such a thing happens among natives all the time! Sometimes, it is a problem with sense of humour. As a foreigner, I am not expected to have any. A part of natives takes my sense of humour normally, as they have one too. Someone finds my sense of humour bad and that is ok as well. But there are some (like in the Iversen's example, which I found funny btw. This kind of playing with words is actually used by almost every comedy actor or writer in English.), who take any sign of it for a mistake and that's what I hate. And the third example: people taking my non-language related mistake for a language one. Such a thing can sometimes actually be a communication and learning obstacle. A classmate in France didn't answer my question what something was. Instead, he insisted I just didn't know the word, showed me what the google translate was, put the word in to illuminate me...and found out the Czech word was exactly the same as the French one :-D Nope, my French wasn't the problem, my medicine knowledge was (which is absolutely normal for any medicine student. We don't know something all the time).

Really, we could have a whole thread on these :-D

Edit: corrected one sentence
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Cainntear » Sun Mar 04, 2018 12:42 pm

Cavesa wrote:I agree with Tiia and Iversen so much here!

So do I, but GalaxyRocker is still right.

English writing conventions are very arbitrary, and they don't match the native speaker's internal model of the language.

Native language is second nature to a speaker, and can be done without any concentration on form; the same is true of fluent second languages (using the technical meaning of fluency). Any feature of the written form that requires even partially conscious concentration is not "language" per se. They're/their/there is not a language mistake.

There is a question of whether dialectal features can be considered "mistakes" when standard English (or any other language is concerned) and that's a much more thorny matter.

(But if anyone tries to tell me "Who did you give it to?" is incorrect and it should be "To whom did you give it?" I'll slap them in the face with a glove and say "How dare thee, knave! Thou shalst not impose thy uncouth ways on me!")

Now I have no problem with imperfect English, and I have no problem with non-natives learning a dialectal form that is appropriate to where they live/work/spend their holidays. As an English teacher, it pains me to have to point out that some of the very natural forms my students use are not going to be looked on kindly in an exam.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby tiia » Sun Mar 04, 2018 3:17 pm

I hesitated to answer on the grammar vs. spelling error thing again. But I did some google search on how making mistakes with spelling homonyms is treated in German.

There is this pdf (in German): where they are mentioning that (rough translation by me):
"Diagnosed mistakes are often put into different error categories by different teachers. In the study by Häfele/Zillig a missing komma and a following das (instead of dass), were considered sometimes as grammar, sometimes as punctuation, sometimes a orthography and sometimes as punctuation and grammar mistake."

Orig.: 3. Diagnostizierte Fehler werden häufig „von verschiedenen Lehrpersonen unterschiedlichen Fehlerkategorien zugeordnet“ (Häfele/Zillig 2008: 68). Beispielsweise wurde in der Untersuchung von Häfele/Zillig ein fehlendes Komma mit darauffolgendem das (anstelle von dass) teilweise als Grammatikfehler, teilweise als Zeichensetzungsfehler, teilweise als Orthographiefehler und teilweise als Zeichensetzungs- und Grammatikfehler gewertet.

That's actually a huge variety, isn't it? I'm even surprised they don't mention the combination punctuation+orthography, as that one would be possible too.

Page 21 of the pdf also has an interesting table how some mistakes were put into different categories. (Explanation/translation of the error categories for non-Germans at the end of this post.)

Further search also in English showed, that not everyone is sharing the same opinion. So this is a controversial topic.

In a few sources I found, what I actually can agree with: How an error is treated depends on what the corrector thinks, what the author intended to say and what would the most likely reason for making the error. So the corrector has to make assumptions and sometimes his assumptions may be wrong. Many errors may have different causes and sometimes it may not be easy to determine, which one it is.


And there we are again at the point, where natives and non-natives may be assumed to have different intentions. This is useful, but shouldn't be done too much, because otherwise we end up kind of prohibiting non-natives to play with words, having humor or making simple typos. Humor and playing with words are in my opinion such a nice way to explore the possibilities a new language gives you, that learners should be encouraged to do this.

As Cavesa and Iversen already had their examples I'm putting another one in here: I once had a nice online writing class and had written about some issue and the reasons behind it. The reason was an old law, not being valid anymore (don't remember why that was so). This old law had been preventing the problems that arose as soon as it wasn't inplace anymore.
Now I only wrote this rather short, as a law, not being legally binding anymore and was corrected into something that meant there would be a new law. It took me a while to explain that the suggested alternative word was actually not describing the issue correctly. If I would have accepted the correction without further questions, I would not have even known, that the text was now meaning the wrong thing. In the end it turned out that my original wording had been correct.



(For those not knowing the typical abbreviations for the error categories used in German:
R=Rechtschreibung=orthography
Gr=Grammatik=grammar
Stil=style
A=Ausdruck=expression
R/A= see R and A
Ugs=Umgangssprache=colloquial
Tempus=Time
k.A.=keine Angabe=not mentioned
Satzbau=sentence structure/syntax
Auslassung=missing word/frase
Nur angestrichen= only marked (I don't know, why that's different from "k.A.")
Last edited by tiia on Sun Mar 04, 2018 3:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Serpent » Sun Mar 04, 2018 3:48 pm

tiia wrote: Casvesa and Iverson
:? :? :?
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby tiia » Sun Mar 04, 2018 4:00 pm

Serpent wrote:
tiia wrote:
:? :? :?

Thanks. I corrected it in the original post.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Cainntear » Sun Mar 04, 2018 7:50 pm

tiia wrote:Further search also in English showed, that not everyone is sharing the same opinion. So this is a controversial topic.

Yes, but the fact is that the majority of opinions are wrong -- psychology and neuroscience are not bound by democracy.
A language is a spoken or signed phenomenon. Writing is not "language" -- it is, as Vygotsky described it, a "second-order abstraction", or as others have said "a picture of language". I personally wish we spent more time teaching punctuation, as it helps mitigate for the loss of tone-of-voice cues, but there are very few places where a homophone error (or a phonetically understandable spelling that isn't a real world at all) really harms the sentence. The fact that homophone errors are so common in every language where there are homophones that aren't also homographs tells us how completely normal they are.

In a few sources I found, what I actually can agree with: How an error is treated depends on what the corrector thinks, what the author intended to say and what would the most likely reason for making the error. So the corrector has to make assumptions and sometimes his assumptions may be wrong. Many errors may have different causes and sometimes it may not be easy to determine, which one it is.

Yup, which is why language teachers should really spend more time learning the languages of their students. I can see German interference in your English above (comma before conjunction), and because I can see it, I can parse your intended meaning, but I can easily picture a teacher with even less knowledge of German than me completely misinterpreting your first sentence and then giving a "correction" that completely misses the point of what you were trying to say.

As Cavesa and Iversen already had their examples I'm putting another one in here: I once had a nice online writing class and had written about some issue and the reasons behind it. The reason was an old law, not being valid anymore (don't remember why that was so). This old law had been preventing the problems that arose as soon as it wasn't inplace anymore.
Now I only wrote this rather short, as a law, not being legally binding anymore and was corrected into something that meant there would be a new law. It took me a while to explain that the suggested alternative word was actually not describing the issue correctly. If I would have accepted the correction without further questions, I would not have even known, that the text was now meaning the wrong thing. In the end it turned out that my original wording had been correct.

The problem here is that a great many teachers are so narrowly focused on structural features of language that they end up ignoring the meaning in a sentence. This is a side-effect of the whole focus on correctness and correction (says a teacher who is absolutely obsessed with correctness and correction!) (In fact there is a school of thought that says the low academic performance of English-speaking countries compared to much of the rest of the world is down to the fact that writing in English requires so much conscious attention that schoolkids are left with so little thought-space to deal with the topic they're supposed to be writing about.)

On the upside, I've seen very few people ever take a false correction as correct. Basically, the correction comes back making no sense, the student looks utterly baffled and the correction gets forgotten. On the downside, many students blame themselves for not understanding the garbled correction.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Random Review » Mon Mar 05, 2018 2:48 am

When I first read this latest twist in the thread, I was a little surprised; because when I say these two words ("their" and "they're) in isolation, they are not homophones and yet I do sometimes make this exact spelling mistake. :oops:

Then I tried saying them in sentences and found that in my idiolect they are indeed pronounced the same way, but with 2 different pronunciations for each. I don't know what I'd call these, because I suppose theoretically "they're" should never be stressed in a sentence (yet I seem to so in sentences like "They're doing it."- i.e. not anyone else); but I could call them "strong" and "weak" pronunciations I guess. The "weak" pronunciations of each and the "strong" pronunciations of each are identical (again I hope it's clear that I'm talking about my idiolect, which may well be rather peculiar *).

Go figure.

* I discovered recently that my /s/ is different from that of most English speakers. When reading about the /s/ in Standard Chinese, I was surprised to read that in English the /s/ is pronounced with the tip of the tongue on or just slightly behind the alveolar ridge. For me it very clearly rests between the upper and lower teeth. A quick straw poll of the other native speakers in the office confirmed what I had read to be correct. I figured maybe I was misunderstanding the point of articulation of my /s/ or something; but I tried the trick where you start to pronounce a consonant, stop and quickly breathe in (the cold air revealing the points of articulation) and it's definitely the tip of my tongue between my upper and lower teeth (slightly more upper that lower to be precise).
Sorry for digressing so much.

Edit: I was clearly wrong to think that "they're" should never be stressed in a sentence.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Cainntear » Mon Mar 05, 2018 8:52 pm

Random Review wrote:When I first read this latest twist in the thread, I was a little surprised; because when I say these two words ("their" and "they're) in isolation, they are not homophones and yet I do sometimes make this exact spelling mistake. :oops:

I'm in the same boat actually -- on one level I'm completely convinced that I pronounce they're/there/their differently, but then I keep catching myself typing one instead of the other and realise that my beliefs about my own pronunciation are wrong. For yeeeeaaars I actually believed that they're/there/their were only homophones in England, and in Scotland everything was different, but the evidence in my errors says otherwise.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Cavesa » Mon Mar 05, 2018 10:01 pm

Cainntear wrote:
In a few sources I found, what I actually can agree with: How an error is treated depends on what the corrector thinks, what the author intended to say and what would the most likely reason for making the error. So the corrector has to make assumptions and sometimes his assumptions may be wrong. Many errors may have different causes and sometimes it may not be easy to determine, which one it is.

Yup, which is why language teachers should really spend more time learning the languages of their students. I can see German interference in your English above (comma before conjunction), and because I can see it, I can parse your intended meaning, but I can easily picture a teacher with even less knowledge of German than me completely misinterpreting your first sentence and then giving a "correction" that completely misses the point of what you were trying to say.

As Cavesa and Iversen already had their examples I'm putting another one in here: I once had a nice online writing class and had written about some issue and the reasons behind it. The reason was an old law, not being valid anymore (don't remember why that was so). This old law had been preventing the problems that arose as soon as it wasn't inplace anymore.
Now I only wrote this rather short, as a law, not being legally binding anymore and was corrected into something that meant there would be a new law. It took me a while to explain that the suggested alternative word was actually not describing the issue correctly. If I would have accepted the correction without further questions, I would not have even known, that the text was now meaning the wrong thing. In the end it turned out that my original wording had been correct.

The problem here is that a great many teachers are so narrowly focused on structural features of language that they end up ignoring the meaning in a sentence. This is a side-effect of the whole focus on correctness and correction (says a teacher who is absolutely obsessed with correctness and correction!) (In fact there is a school of thought that says the low academic performance of English-speaking countries compared to much of the rest of the world is down to the fact that writing in English requires so much conscious attention that schoolkids are left with so little thought-space to deal with the topic they're supposed to be writing about.)

On the upside, I've seen very few people ever take a false correction as correct. Basically, the correction comes back making no sense, the student looks utterly baffled and the correction gets forgotten. On the downside, many students blame themselves for not understanding the garbled correction.


It is only logical the opinions on a mistake vary. There are simply too many variables in the process, including stuff like educational background of both the teacher and the student, differences in sense of humour or lack of it (and this is even more variable on the individual bases than it is a cultural difference), experience of the teacher with a certain kind of students and therefore certain kind of mistakes.

I don't mind this so much, even though it can certainly be a problem during the exams. The only exams unrelated problem I find important, which is also very common, is a teacher who is not aware of this phenomenon and different opinions on a mistake. I have met many, who assumed that they automatically understood the intention of the learner perfectly and it was stubborness or stupidity or low level (lower than the real level of the student), when a student couldn't accept the correction.

It is not that bad in 1 on 1 teaching setting (I think we all subconsciously choose people likely to understand our way of thinking). It is a bit more problematic in adult group classes. There is less time for explanations and "arguing with the teacher" is actually unacceptable for many students, who would find it against their behaviour norms and would feel awkward. I agree they are not likely to accept the mistaken correction but it is a missed learning opportunity, because learning to say what we want to say is the priority. It is an absolute disaster in the classes for kids and teenagers, because some teachers simply cannot accept a child might have wanted to say something and just react with shouting or ridiculing the person. That was one of my main reasons to hate English at school, not only the teacher was shouting all the time, but she also insisted on teaching us useless nonsense and not teaching me stuff I would have wanted to say. The teachers of adults at least don't shout, but the result can still be similarily discouraging and fruitless. Our mistakes are an important part of progress and desiring appropriate corrections is the only reason to actually pay a teacher.

Openmindedness is unfortunately not automatic.

I really agree with the need for teachers to learn the languages of their students, at least if they are in the situation of having mostly natives of one language. We can hardly expect a teacher in Berlin to speak the five or six most usual native languages well enough to identify mistakes transferred from them. But I see no excuse for a native expat. Really, people without the experience of having learnt a foreign language should never be allowed to teach their own, in my opinion.

This is a side-effect of the whole focus on correctness and correction (says a teacher who is absolutely obsessed with correctness and correction!) (In fact there is a school of thought that says the low academic performance of English-speaking countries compared to much of the rest of the world is down to the fact that writing in English requires so much conscious attention that schoolkids are left with so little thought-space to deal with the topic they're supposed to be writing about.)

I quoted this again to comment. This is very true. We have a "good" example here in the Czech Republic. In the last reform of the highschool leaving exam (which basically meant lowering the standards for the good schools without improving the bad ones, change to more teaching for tests more than for the real world, and lots and lots of money for one particular private company), the Czech compositions were changed. To make the grades "objective", they put everything into scoring grids. The worst thing is not fitting into the definition of the genre, which is actually a very subjective thing and hard to do even for professionals in some cases (two or three genres bordering journalism and literature, which are especially problematic in Czech). You get automatic fail for this. You need to fit the criteria to gather points. And the content doesn't matter. The grade how are sentences and paragraphs linguistically tied together, but they don't care whether the thought holds together. They kill creativity and not only in the sense of discouraging what we usually consider to be creative writing or the imagination. They make people avoid thinking too much about writing, because that thinking can make you lose points. But in the real life, you need to read stuff people were thinking about, where the ideas hold together, where you start from point A and logically get to point X. The teachers are not happy about this, the students are discouraged to properly study, the parents see their children have to learn nonsense, the universities complain about the level of the students starting these days. But nothing will be changed. There are many more problems with the exam, and it actually damages the education, but this is the most obvious example and one that is exactly what you describe.

Tiia wrote:And there we are again at the point, where natives and non-natives may be assumed to have different intentions. This is useful, but shouldn't be done too much, because otherwise we end up kind of prohibiting non-natives to play with words, having humor or making simple typos. Humor and playing with words are in my opinion such a nice way to explore the possibilities a new language gives you, that learners should be encouraged to do this.
This is extremely true. It really depends on the natives. Some French natives had no problem with my way of speaking and sense of humour. Some did have such a problem. And unlike some Czechs, who simply don't like it (which is absolutely ok), they simply assumed it was all just my mistakes. It actually took me some time to tell these two attitudes apart in France. I've never had this problem in English or Spanish. I think it has a lot to do with the fact the French natives simply don't expect any foreigners to be good at the language, so some of them automatically expect everything to be a mistake.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Daniel N. » Tue Mar 06, 2018 11:11 pm

To go back to the original question:

Cases are considered hard because everyone heard about cases. You have to use them even in basic sentences like 'I'm eating ice-cream'.

Another thing: cases can be counted: German has 4, Russian 6, BCMS supposedly 7, Finnish some huge number, more than 10 for sure. It sounds scary. People think: I will need to learn 6 words instead of one for each thing.

What is less discussed is the number of declension classes, i.e. patterns to create case forms (usually by endings, but there can be vowel changes/umlauts, changes of stress and maybe something else). This is the actual scary thing, but it's almost never discussed.

In 1960's, standard linguistic textbooks claimed all languages have roughly the same complexity. In recent decades, this view has been completely abandoned - linguists are now quite certain that some languages are way more complex than others.

How many declension classes are in Russian at all? I have no idea. 10? 20?

I have no idea even in my native language, because there are a lot of minor classes, classes that have additional stress shifts, classes that have change of tone in some cases - but then my dialect has no tones; classes that have a shift of stress only in plural, classes that have additional forms of genitive plural etc etc And this is hard.

Of course, that's not the hardest thing in Slavic languages.
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