We haven't got up to 'yes" yet!

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Re: We haven't got up to 'yes" yet!

Postby reineke » Sat Jan 05, 2019 2:18 am

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Re: We haven't got up to 'yes" yet!

Postby Random Review » Sat Jan 05, 2019 11:29 am

CompImp wrote:
Iversen wrote:Besides Google now has 1140 hits on "The book is red". That should be proof enough that there are situations where this sentence can be uttered, and that things may become more common while we talk about them.

The problem is they all link back to this very thread :lol:


I think that was clearly intentional humour on Iversen's part, mate. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Re: We haven't got up to 'yes" yet!

Postby Iversen » Sat Jan 05, 2019 3:41 pm

I'm never totally serious, but the fact is that we have increased the use of the sentence simply by having this discussion.

And I still claim that not only that there are situations where it can be used even outside forum discussions, but also that it represents a pattern which newbee learners not only can, but also MUST learn as fast as possible. If you prefer to use another object than a book and another characteristic than the red color to teach them pattern "the [substantive] is [adjective]" then it is OK with me.

Cainntear wrote:The colourless book has no clear and intuitive meaning.

No, and my point was that if I can't even be allowed to say that the book is red, then I can just as well start saying that it is colourless with red spots. Or that it is alive, evil and eats small careless hogwarts students for lunch.

Cavesa wrote:I've got plenty of red textbooks. They scare me.

All dictionaries from the Danish editing house Gyldendal are red, and I like them. Now I'm going you to show you a picture of one of them ...

Gyldendal Ru-Da.jpg

and as you can see the book is red.
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Re: We haven't got up to 'yes" yet!

Postby zenmonkey » Sat Jan 05, 2019 5:37 pm

I learned English about 45 years ago with sentence constructs that went much like this:

This is Pam.
Pam has a pan.
The pan is hot.

Tom has a book.
The book is red.
Tom’s book is red.

Is the book hot?
Is the pan red?

Is it Tom’s pan?
...

The sentence construct might seem boring and simplistic but it was effective for my age (7) and speed. Doing about a thousand of those a week and boom, English speaker in 3 months. And I still remember some of those specific examples (I’d pay good money to get copies of the books I used - Pam and Pat are seared into my mind).

My point is that these example sentences aren’t isolated they are used in an ensemble and hopefully the learned moves away from definite obj - copula ... quickly. Learning adjective placement, colors, etc... isn’t that bad in that the sentence has vocabulary and contextual information.

“[thebook] red” would be the Hebrew equivalent (no copula). “[this/that] book red [asserted state/something I know because I saw it]” is the Tibetan (no definite article without placement and copulas of assertion or observation). Both convey basic information about the language early on and tell you a bit about grammar and vocabulary.

Are they good sentences? I think I’m only able to judge in the context of a full lesson...
Last edited by zenmonkey on Sat Jan 05, 2019 5:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: We haven't got up to 'yes" yet!

Postby Random Review » Sat Jan 05, 2019 5:40 pm

Don't hate me for keeping this going, but I think I understood Cainntear as saying two separate things here. The first one is the debate about whether it is natural and that has been done to death and probably won't benefit from further going round in circles. The other, however, is that he seemed (to me) to be also claiming that it is very difficult for an adult learning their first L2 or pretty much any child to give a real meaning to it. Yes, I acknowledge that for people on this forum who know how this game works and if it's given an appropriate context, then it's a good illustrative sentence that we can and do find meanings for. I'm not trying to open that debate up again. Even as an adult I find such books as zenmonkey describes immediately above useful and actively seek them out sometimes. Nevertheless I can't help coming back to the fact that most Anglophones fail in learning an L2 and the Anglophone regulars on this forum are not typical in that regard (in many cases and large part thanks to advice we received on this forum).

So it seems to me that Cainntear is right about this second point and that from the point of view of designing textbooks or "coursemaps", this is important and worth further discussion. I at least would be interested in hearing him elaborate on how to identify language that students and learners can more easily and intuitively give meaning to.
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Re: We haven't got up to 'yes" yet!

Postby zenmonkey » Sat Jan 05, 2019 5:52 pm

Random Review wrote:So it seems to me that Cainntear is right about this second point and that from the point of view of designing textbooks or "coursemaps", this is important and worth further discussion. I at least would be interested in hearing him elaborate on how to identify language that students and learners can more easily and intuitively give meaning to.


Fundamentally I agree.
Working more with structures that say ... this book, that book, my book etc...seems to solve that particular problem.
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Re: We haven't got up to 'yes" yet!

Postby zenmonkey » Sat Jan 05, 2019 6:08 pm

CompImp wrote:
zenmonkey wrote:I learned English about 45 years ago with sentence constructs that went much like this:

This is Pam.
Pam has a pan.
The pan is hot.

Tom has a book.
The book is red.
Tom’s book is red.

Is the book hot?
Is the pan red?

Is it Tom’s pan?
...

The sentence construct might seem boring and simplistic but it was effective for my age (7) and speed. Doing about a thousand of those a week and boom, English speaker in 3 months. And I still remember some of those specific examples (I’d pay good money to get copies of the books I used - Pam and Pat are seared into my mind).

My point is that these example sentences aren’t isolated they are used in an ensemble and hopefully the learned moves away from definite obj - copula ... quickly. Learning adjective placement, colors, etc... isn’t that bad in that the sentence has vocabulary and contextual information.

“[thebook] red” would be the Hebrew equivalent (no copula). “[this/that] book red [asserted state/something I know because I saw it]” is the Tibetan (no definite article without placement and copulas of assertion or observation). Both convey basic information about the language early on and tell you a bit about grammar and vocabulary.

Are they good sentences? I think I’m only able to judge in the context of a full lesson...

English isn't your L1 ? Wow....very impressive.

EDIT: nm, saw the age.


It’s become my L1 - I essentially grew up bilingual (semi - tri) and today my strengths are English > French > Spanish. With French and Spanish changing spots regularly, depending on time spent with different family members. As a child my environment had many languages.
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Re: We haven't got up to 'yes" yet!

Postby Cavesa » Sat Jan 05, 2019 6:27 pm

Iversen wrote:And I still claim that not only that there are situations where it can be used even outside forum discussions, but also that it represents a pattern which newbee learners not only can, but also MUST learn as fast as possible. If you prefer to use another object than a book and another characteristic than the red color to teach them pattern "the [substantive] is [adjective]" then it is OK with me.

Cainntear wrote:The colourless book has no clear and intuitive meaning.

No, and my point was that if I can't even be allowed to say that the book is red, then I can just as well start saying that it is colourless with red spots. Or that it is alive, evil and eats small careless hogwarts students for lunch.

Exactly, the construction it teaches is essential. And what words are used to teach it is less important.

Truth be told, I find The book is red, or even colourless much more meaningful than the example "The manager is absent."

In some classes, it could lead to complicated explanations of what is a manager. Really, asking for the manager is not that common in some countries, not even if we use other words, like "your superior" etc.

The grammar construction is hyperimportant. And the words used in the example are extremely common. The students are not supposed to get stuck on the sentence.


zenmonkey wrote:I learned English about 45 years ago with sentence constructs that went much like this:

This is Pam.
Pam has a pan.
The pan is hot.

Tom has a book.
The book is red.
Tom’s book is red.

Is the book hot?
Is the pan red?

Is it Tom’s pan?
...

The sentence construct might seem boring and simplistic but it was effective for my age (7) and speed. Doing about a thousand of those a week and boom, English speaker in 3 months. And I still remember some of those specific examples (I’d pay good money to get copies of the books I used - Pam and Pat are seared into my mind).

My point is that these example sentences aren’t isolated they are used in an ensemble and hopefully the learned moves away from definite obj - copula ... quickly. Learning adjective placement, colors, etc... isn’t that bad in that the sentence has vocabulary and contextual information.

“[thebook] red” would be the Hebrew equivalent (no copula). “[this/that] book red [asserted state/something I know because I saw it]” is the Tibetan (no definite article without placement and copulas of assertion or observation). Both convey basic information about the language early on and tell you a bit about grammar and vocabulary.

Are they good sentences? I think I’m only able to judge in the context of a full lesson...


Exactly. Coursebooks starting like this can be awesome!

And some of the weird turns of this whole discussion were not only the insistence on "the book is red" being unnatural, but also the assumption such a sentence was taught in isolation. And then we were suddenly imaging weird people asked to imagine the meaning of "the book is red" in vacuum, without any hint and context.

Of course not! The student quoted in the first post had not been taught such a sentence in isolation either, I'd bet. They just remember it in isolation, when asked about their language learning, and used it as an example. It is very probable they were taught similar sets of examples.

Really, I am more and more convinced the problem are lazy teachers unable to get their students past the units 1 and 2 in five months (I've seen real life examples of this phenomenon), and therefore leaving their students stuck at these sentences and later burnt out.
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Re: We haven't got up to 'yes" yet!

Postby reineke » Sat Jan 05, 2019 6:48 pm

Quem Dii oderunt pedagogum fecerunt.
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Re: We haven't got up to 'yes" yet!

Postby Cainntear » Sat Jan 05, 2019 8:01 pm

Iversen wrote:and as you can see the book is red.

It. It is red.
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