"My English teacher at school said..."

I am curious what students have argued with you over being correct on because of their Taiwanese public school English teacher. A teacher I work with said the students argued for a long time that deer is an uncountable noun. Their teacher at school swore it was.

Just wondering what else you have heard.

I’ve never heard of a teacher saying that deer is uncountable, but your post is a good question for going off-topic. Why do words like deer, bison, fish (and their various species such as cod, trout, salmon) etc. have the same singular and plural form anyway?

Here’s a theory. I wonder whether in the past, before we hunted and fished them to near extinction, they were usually encountered in such large herds (or schools) that the individual members were, in effect, uncountable.

Like a bowl of rice. You could count the individual grains, but when we usually encounter rice, the individual grains are “uncountable”.

Like cattle perhaps? Is saying “a head of cattle”, just like saying “a grain of rice”?

So perhaps there were once two senses of “deer”, one countable and one uncountable. Just like there are two senses of coffee and tea.

(Which is not to defend any teacher who tries to tell his or her students that deer is uncountable (except when it is venison, of course.))

My theory is probably completely wrong, but still, there must be a reason for the irregularity.

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I’ve got a few pigs and a little deer. It’s a Muntjak.

Don’t worry, I won’t give up the day job.

i remember when i was teaching in a cram school and one of my gr5 students was practicing for a speech contest. He kept finishing with “thanks for your listening” and i kept correcting him by telling him that “Thank you for listening” or “thanks for listening” is correct. His dad came in a few days later telling me that because his son’s public school english teacher told him that “thanks for your listening” is correct, that is the form he will be using in the speech contest. I replied that if he wanted his son to speak incorrect english, then i wouldn’t assist any further.

Well, what did he use in the end?
I told a student of mine a few years ago that his school teachers was an idiot. He told his teacher what I’d said and I was little more careful afterwards. At least both of us agreed that the teacher was an idiot.

The worst is when you spend three years teaching them the correct pronunciation of the letters “f”, “l”, “h”, “n” and "x"in kindergarten, and three months into elementary school they’re back with the “ellows” and “efus” and “orangees”. :bluemad:

This happened to me all the time at the private jr/sr high where I used to teach. All of the local teachers taught it that way and ignored any effort I made to correct it. Thank you for calling. Thank you for coming. Thank you for shopping at KMart.

The kid can’t use your correction in the contest because he will cause his teacher to lose face. Simple as that.

What I found most annoying is when an adult student would ask me something, would then refuse to believe me, saying “But in grade 7 they taught us that this was correct,” and would then start talking to the other students in Chinese (or Korean, it happened there too) about how native speakers didn’t know their own language.
Would anyone from a Western country seriously think an elementary school textbook was infallible? Or that a non-native speaker of a language was in all cases a better authority than a native speaker?

One I got over and over in Korea: “She is so good girl.” “She is so cute baby.” I would correct it to “She is such a good girl.” and “She is such a cute baby.” Or just “She is so cute.”
The students would always argue, and I couldn’t understand why. Finally I figured it out: their textbooks said to use “so” before an adjective, and “such a” before a noun.

Another one: my grade seven students clearly thought I was an uneducated idiot when I told them “He fell the horse off.” was incorrect. Their teacher told them it was right, so it was right.

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[quote]What I found most annoying is when an adult student would ask me something, would then refuse to believe me, saying “But in grade 7 they taught us that this was correct,” and would then start talking to the other students in Chinese (or Korean, it happened there too) about how native speakers didn’t know their own language.
Would anyone from a Western country seriously think an elementary school textbook was infallible? Or that a non-native speaker of a language was in all cases a better authority than a native speaker?[/quote]
I’ve never been an English teacher, but I used to get this all the time from one particular Taiwanese ex (who happened to be a teacher). She liked to practice writing in English and would ask me to fix her spelling and/or grammar, both of which were awful (although I never criticized - I know how difficult it is). Some of her sentences were so mangled I would just ask her what idea she wanted to express, and then rewrite them. When I was done, she would get mightily offended about half of the corrections, especially the rewrites, and lambast me about my poor vocabulary and “incorrect” grammar. She would conclude with “Are you sure you’re really english? You don’t even know your own language!”. I began to suspect that Engrish as taught in Taiwanese schools has a vocabulary and grammar all of its own - a sort of Pidgin or Creole - which is markedly different to the language we barbarians speak.

Here’s one I’ve encountered: “each other” vs. “one another.” Some students insist that “each other” is only limited to two parties, whereas if you’re referring to three or more parties, you can only use “one another.” The same with between and among. They’re bound by the “rule” that says between is always for two parties and for anything more than two, one should use “among.”

[quote=“Puppet”]I am curious what students have argued with you over being correct on because of their Taiwanese public school English teacher. A teacher I work with said the students argued for a long time that deer is an uncountable noun. Their teacher at school swore it was.

Just wondering what else you have heard.[/quote]
How many deer are there? That is what should be said.

I also have students who tell me that my listening is no good when I correct their pronunciation. They will swear they said it correctly and blame my poor hearing.

Deer is a countable noun, but like sheep, its plural form is the same as its singular form. (Why? Deer may have come from a different declension from other animal nouns in Old English. “deer” comes from an Old English word meaning “animal”. Compare the German cognate Tier, whose plural is Tiere, if I’m not mistaken.)

But note: when people talk about hunting game, they often use the singular. The big game hunters during the glory days of the colonial era didn’t hunt “elephants”, they hunted “elephant.”

The “rule” also says that “between” can be used for pairwise sharing/division within a group of three or more.

But in everyday speech by native English speakers, the rule is much less rigid.

[quote=“Chris”]The “rule” also says that “between” can be used for pairwise sharing/division within a group of three or more.

But in everyday speech by native English speakers, the rule is much less rigid.[/quote]
Language was not created to follow rules. Rules were created to try to explain language.

I once met someone who described it as “English with Chinese characteristics.”

I just want to say I am reading this on my blackberry. I want to “like” every comment, but it would take hours. Thank you so far for the replie§.

I once met someone who described it as “English with Chinese characteristics.”[/quote]

:roflmao:

Hanged vs. hung: Local students often insist on the rule that people are hanged and clothes are hung, very cut-and-dried.

I always thought people could be both hanged and hung. People are hanged as a form of execution, but they could be hung over the side of a boat during a rescue, for instance. For other things, hung would be the only correct word.