I had this question on a list of “Daily English” my kids know:
Q: How many people are in your family?
A: There are X people in my family.
The questions seems perfectly OK to me, but I guess a few grammatically talented parents pointed out that I left out THERE in the question.
When I taught them I wasn’t actually teaching them the THERE+BE grammar (and question forming.) It was just some random thing the school wanted me to teach.
I pulled out my trusty “Basic English Grammar” book and sure enough, seems I should have a THERE there. But intuition tells me that omitting the THERE is just one of those grammar oddities that is accepted as being OK (a Google search founds some people that agree.)
Is the omission of there something you guys do too? I can think of a thousand sentences I’d use without THERE. Using the THERE seems clumsy to me.
(Because it’s probably more helpful to the kids, I’m going to add THERE to the question, I’m just wondering what yall thinks.)
Possibly they learn the phrase “How many people are there?” and various add-ons like “in your family?”, “in your house”, “in your pants” etc.
“How many people are in your family?” is fine by me, and it seems to me the natural spoken way, but if I was writing reported speech I would write “Dave asked Buster how many people there were in his family”. Is it a written-spoken thing? And why am I not in the pub at a quarter to seven on a Friday? Goodness Gracious Me!
Queenslanders say “I’m going with” and then they stop talking. I’m still looking forward to finishing some of those conversations.
The “with” hangs in the breeze. With you? With them? With everybody?
With Mabel? With Jackoff?
Just with.[/quote]
Mordeth said that just the other day to Truant “Let me know when and I’ll go with.” I thought he’d just been caught short and had to rush to the toilet without finishing his sentence, but now it seems its a “thing.” Strange.
“How many peas are in the pod?”
“How many glass bottles are on the wall?”
“How many ill-informed Taiwanese parents are in the classroom?”
MK, simply tell your parents they’re ignorant fuckwits who wouldn’t know the application of English grammar if it jumped out the toilet pan and bit their participles.
[quote=“miltownkid”]I had this question on a list of “Daily English” my kids know:
Q: How many people are in your family?
A: There are X people in my family.
The questions seems perfectly OK to me, but I guess a few grammatically talented parents pointed out that I left out THERE in the question.
When I taught them I wasn’t actually teaching them the THERE+BE grammar (and question forming.) It was just some random thing the school wanted me to teach.
I pulled out my trusty “Basic English Grammar” book and sure enough, seems I should have a THERE there. But intuition tells me that omitting the THERE is just one of those grammar oddities that is accepted as being OK (a Google search founds some people that agree.)
Is the omission of there something you guys do too? I can think of a thousand sentences I’d use without THERE. Using the THERE seems clumsy to me.
(Because it’s probably more helpful to the kids, I’m going to add THERE to the question, I’m just wondering what yall thinks.)
You are asking and answering two different styles of questions. A better pairing would be this:
How many people are in your family?
Five people are in my family.
How many people are there in your family?
There are five people in my family.
I always do my best to fit the answers to the questions. It helps the students understand the structure better.
Another example:
Where are you from?
I’m from Taiwan.
The car needs *washed instead of The car needs to be washed.
The machine needs fixed instead of The machine needs to be fixed.
We don’t actually say “washed”… we say “worshed”.[/quote]
God, Americans are dumb. Where I come from, we say “the car needs washing.” That’s the proper, normal way.
Or my mother’s usual phrase - “Your room needs cleaning.”
Maoman, I think the answer “Five people are in my family,” sounds a bit awkward. Would you also answer “How many people are in Taiwan?” with “Three million people are in Taiwan” or “There are three million people in Taiwan?”?
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