Trying to edit my paper and looking back at some of the exercises we had gone through on Wednesday, I realized that the definition of colloquial English, and the general concept of colloquial English, wasn't something that I really have a handle on. So naturally, I turned to the internet for some sort of enlightening about the subject matter. Colloquial English, according to Wikipedia's definition, is a word, phrase, or paralanguage that is employed in conversational or informal language but not in formal speech or formal writing. The very idea of taking something as simple as P -> Q, P, / : Q and translating it into English is something that I'm more than willing to admit that I can't get a handle on it.
Being told that formally, our writing isn't up to a certain standard made me wonder why, and the answer I found was simple. I had never been taught the basics of the English language the way I had when I was learning Spanish in high school. I didn't know, and really I still struggle with figuring out what the subjunctive tense is. I wasn't taught about passive voice, because in English, my native language, it's hard to dissect and pull apart. Conjugating words isn't something I ever learned in English. In Spanish? It was the basic building block of my learning, something that to this day I would be able to do with most of the verbs I know simply because I was taught a set of rules, memorized them, and have been able to apply them to a language that I was learning. Being dropped into the English language and growing up knowing it has put me at a severe disadvantage, and I'm not afraid to admit that. While I am willing to admit that I'm absolutely blessed that I am a literate member of society who can speak fluent English, the problem with being born an English speaking American is that you don't have to learn the same way you learn a foreign language in a classroom. You figure out what words mean, you're immersed in a language, and you don't necessarily have to care about what you're conjugating or translating.
So I suppose what I'm getting at is that this stuff is hard, differentiating between formal and colloquial English, and mainly translating equations from basic, awkward sentences to colloquial phrases that sound natural is going to be one of the greatest struggles I face in this class.
What's helped me a lot with grammar is just looking up rules and the names of grammatical organizations. Lots of people find this really boring but I think it can be really fun. It also gives a new appreciation for how much more fun colloquial and dialectical Englishes are.
ReplyDeleteSeveral points here. I'm glad you're starting to recognize your own language as a subject worth investigating, and having studied another language is generally a big help. You can of course conjugate verbs in English very easily; you just haven't systematized it -- something that your mastery of Spanish makes very easy (I say, you say, he/she/it says, they say...). The subjunctive mood isn't a tense, and Spanish's subjunctive mood will be helpful there, too -- once you understand it in another language, it is obvious how it works in your own.
ReplyDeleteAs for distinguishing colloquial from formal language, that's something all native speakers of a language are pretty good at -- we use different words, phrases, and grammatical constructions at a ball game than we do in church, etc., and it takes surprisingly little attention to notice the differences.