Learning English while watching TV

[dieastra]

I guess this is a question mostly for the non native speakers in here but everyone is welcome to join in of course. Basically, I learnt all my English starting about 15 years ago by watching TV and reading fanfictions in original language. In Germany everything on TV is dubbed so there isn't that much exposure to the language like in other

Comments

[my_virtual]

I mostly tried to learn English from RPG videogames. Didn't even suspected, that a preposition at the end of a sentence isn't proper! Thank you very much! :-)

[my_virtual]

Oh, THAT mistake is a typo! :-)

[dieastra]

LOL Happens to the best of us ;)

It's a rule I try not to pay attention to, as nobody else seems to do either. Maybe in a very formal text, but not in conversation.

[beer_good_foamy]

The preposition thing is one of those rules, up with which a lot of people refuse to put. :)

[dieastra]

Heh, nicely put! ;)

In SG-1, there was a fellow alien called "Teal'c". Having watched the original Star Trek now, I would describe him similar to Spock. He also spoke very formal English, and it always stuck out as odd to me when he said things like "It is I, O'Neill" when everywhere else at the internet people would say "me".

It's really confusing for a poor foreigner ;) Trying to do it right, yet wanting to blend in with the others.

[muckefuck]

beer_good_foamy is quoting a famous saying commonly attributed to Winston Churchill. This "rule" has no basis in the descriptive study of English grammar.

[dieastra]

Ah, good old Churchill! Thank you. Sounded a bit like Yoda to me.
Who put the rule there then and why? I bet they are having a great laugh at us.

We used to say "Richard Dean Anderson has a way with words" as he was able to construct really nice sentences and in the middle of his speech would go off a tangent musing about something and trying to find the right expression. His father was an English teacher, that's probably why.

[muckefuck]

They are long dead: Like many prescriptivist rules, this one was promulgated by 18th-century grammarians who thought how similar a language's grammar was to Latin was a measure of how good it was.

[5x6]

There are rules that are routinely violated even by educated native speakers, yet understood as formally incorrect; examples:
- between you and I
- Who did you tell?
- try and do something

and rules that have never been part of spoken English and are inherited from Latin grammarian. Nobody takes them seriously. Examples:
- ending with a preposition
- split infinitive

[dieastra]

Are your examples in the first list the "right" or the "wrong but accepted" ones? Sorry, I can't tell! They sound good to me either way.

[5x6]

Formally correct versions would be:
- between you and me
- Whom did you tell?
- try to do something

[dieastra]

I suspected the "whom" but couldn't find anything at fault with the others.

[5x6]

Regarding the first one, as a German speaker your should feel the difference between the nominative and indirect cases. Just say in German zwischen du und ich instead of zwischen dir und mir

For the last one just translate it literally and you will see that the wrong version is semantically meaningless:

I will try and get to NYC before noon. If you know that you will, it is not trying, it is doing. What you are trying is actually to get to NYC before noon, and your attempt may or may not be successful.

[dieastra]

But isn't there a song called "The Wizard and I"? I know that song lines are not the best way to teach grammar as they have poetic license but I thought we had established that "me" usually is wrong, so this time it being right confuses me.

Thinking about it further, John Barrowman likes to use "myself" a lot in such sentences.

[5x6]

That English speakers make this mistake, I understand. When German speakers do the same, I am baffled.

Correct:
The Wizard and I; you and I (cf. "Die Hexe und ich")
Between you and me; talked to you and me (cf. "Zwischen dir und mir" "sprach zur Hexe und zu mir".

Incorrect:
The wizard and me
Between you and I

[5x6]

"a lot" = "essentially everybody"