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I will chime in with a slight anecdote. I have a direct report that speaks fine English but his written communications are just south of ideal. He asked me to h
by the_lonely_road 5y ago
I will chime in with a slight anecdote. I have a direct report that speaks fine English but his written communications are just south of ideal. He asked me to help him by explicitly pointing out issues with his writing. I have been happy to do so but the process has really highlighted for him how refined my understanding of WHAT is right is contrasted to how poor my understanding of WHY it’s right is. More than half the time I’m forced to say “ that isn’t right, this is how it should be worded instead but I don’t really understand why”.
Language is a crazy thing.
- andrewzah 5y agoThat's the difference of EFL/ESL and a native speaker. If you live in the US/UK you're probably aware of how pitiful the average person is at grammar. However, they can always tell if a sentence is right or wrong for their variant of English. When I taught English abroad, I would get asked questions all the time on things I hadn't researched yet so often the answer was "just because".
- dcminter 5y agoI think the royal order of adjectives is the coolest example of this. Native speakers of English know it intuitively without (usually) even knowing it exists! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order