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Subject:Re: Plug for learning sentence structure From:"Robert E. Allen" <re_allen -at- PNL -dot- GOV> Date:Tue, 16 Aug 1994 19:32:29 GMT
In article <9408161012 -dot- A09927 -at- pcmail -dot- cti-pet -dot- com>, Karla McMaster
<mcmaster%pcmail -dot- cti-pet -dot- com -at- cti-pet -dot- com> says:
>Reading about people diagramming sentences just made me want to give a short
>plug for understanding sentence structure:
>I'm glad I paid attention to that stuff in school, because it sure came in
>handy when I learned German
I had the opposite experience. I just couldn't understand what grammer
was about. I figured if verbs were action words, then in "Ali is a
great fighter," fighter must be a verb. My 100+ year old English
teacher didn't help--she'd been teaching this stuff for years and
figured we should understand it by now.
Then I took Spanish. Through some magic, I suddenly saw how
the parts of speech fit together.
FWIW, my wife is a native Norwegian; she speaks 6 or 7 languages
fluently (she passes for a native in the US and Germany). She says
that English is the easiest language to learn.
So, if your kids are having trouble learning English, let them take
a foreign language. Can't hurt, might help.
