Ni keyi shuo “Wo bu xihuan yundong. Hao NAN o!”
Mei guanxi.
It’s O. K. :uhhuh:
[quote=“bob”]Ni keyi shuo “Wo bu xihuan yundong. Hao NAN o!”
Mei guanxi.
It’s O. K. :uhhuh:[/quote]
You mean “Shi OK le”!
Look Limey, what follows is just the humble opinion of a half assed English teacher.
I think that all this needs to be taken and understood in its context.
The insertion of the preposition for into converstation, or in a written instance, is purely a choice of the speaker or writer. We who are native speakers easily understand the prescence or abscence of this nasty little word (as we do many others).
However, Taiwanese students can be easily confused and that is a well verified part of their learning experience. Confusion has often led to many clarifications in my classes and I am sure that has been your experience, too.
If one says, “I have worked out for x hours or minutes”, or “I worked out for X hours”, that is nothing more than a snip of conversation and should be easily understood by all parties, even if they are Taiwanese or whatever.
Consider this, “I worked out for an hour! How could I have failed?”
Or this, “I have worked out for an hour. I think I am ready.”
The implications that the past or the present perfect tense should reign here are perhaps a more than moot point.
If this is a composition class and a student has written such a line, I think you would do well to point out the differences between spoken and written English.
IMHO if a student had used such a phrase in one of my classes, my approval or disapproval would have depended on the type of construction I had instructed the students to use and the context in which the student had used that particular phrase or syntax.
If it was narrative, and properly punctuated, I could accept this form because the student was repeating something that a real person had supposedly said as long as it was properly contexted.
If I had asked them to write in the persuasive or expository style, I really find it difficult to accept the phrase you have given.
Shrinking it down as most have previously done, In ordinary converstation it really won’t make a rat’s ass difference in the final understanding. After all, that is what communication is about, right?
With all due respect full throttle I could not disagree more.
Prepositions help to clarify the relationship bewteen words in a sentence, especially when that relationship is not made clear by word order. They are hardly optional and their prescence or abscence is frequently essential to the meaning of a sentence.
Take your “work out” example for example.
“Work out” has two meanings one of which is intransitive and the other is transitive. Hence, “I worked out FOR two hours” - but - “I worked out the answer to the problem.”
Like I said prepositions are a grammatical element that help to clarify the meaning of sentences. In the intransitive sense it is frequently omitted but this could perhaps be considered a mistake.
It would NOT be OK to add the preposition in the transitive sense of course.
I think that this sort of explanation is perhaps more the sort of thing that Limey’s students would appreciate. I know mine do.