A Korean friend of mine is studying English and asked me for some help. This is the sentence that she's having trouble understanding: "Freud's prescription is that only by struggling undauntedly against what seems like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence." She only has basic working knowledge of spoken English. It's a classic example of learning English structures from a book well over one's head. She needs to learn it to pass an exam to work at the police station. Her next sentence? "But what would be the security of the good, if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky?" I think Japan ranks lowest in world English with Korea a close second. After teaching in Japan and now seeing the same cryptic phrases in Korean books it's no wonder. It's just absolutely absurd to teach this to people who can't even string a sentence together in real life.
LOL don't know which book that was from but it barely made sense. No way would you need to use anything like that in an everyday conversation. Structures like that rarely exist in day to day english unless your taking some form of advanced learning.
This reminds me about this crappy japanese book meant to teach guys how to score with gaijin girls. One sentence said something like "find girl with octopussy, they like touch in octopussy":shrug:
Thats crazily hard btw after a few passes through google language tool I have this :lol: "Freud is the only recipe to fight against it, seems overwhelmingly against undauntedly man May be able to squirm under their existence"
Does she just need to understand the basic meaning of the sentence? If that is the case what I would do for her is use a thesaurus and replace the words she is having the most trouble understanding with more common ones so she has a better chance to catch the meaning of the sentence.
You would think they would start with something simple, like "See Dick and Jane. See Spot. See Spot run." etc
They do start with something simple. But they focus mostly on studying grammar from books and the difficulty increases over the years. Imagine memorizing 1,000 recipes from a cookbook without actually going through the physical mechanics of cooking. You'd be able to pass a written test about cooking, but if you've only been in front of a stove a handful of times in your life you'd struggle to make any of them. That's what's happening here. When speaking to her, she's slow to respond and often makes basic errors like "I'm not decided" instead of "I haven't decided yet." That's her level of conversation. You can see the stark difference between her ability to speak and her ability to analyze grammar on paper. Now imagine explaining the above sentence to someone whose ability to speak is at that level... Impossible? Yep.
This was one of the biggest problems I faced when teaching English. You are forced to teach them this kind of stuff, because it is this kind of stuff that they will face in the Cambridge/Michigan exams. In the end they can construct amazingly complex grammatical sentences, but their pronunciation and vocabulary is abysmal. It's the examination boards that are to blame. I knew a bunch of kids who spoke like the average Englishman on the street (with a Greek accent) but they failed their proficiency exam due to grammar and pedantic nit-picking questions. I bet most of the people here would have failed them. The shitty thing is that they needed the exam to go to university. Mental!
I don't know about Korea but in Japan they insist on learning allsorts of pointless shit just to look cleaver. My wife has shown me stuff from the TOEC test asking why I never use said phrase or words. Those tests are filled with so much shit that if you spoke like the test book reads you've be seriously beaten around the neighborhood. Educators are so strung up on learning this so called "High level" English that they have no f*ing idea that normal people (who they need to communicate with) would never use such words. Come to think of it, most people wouldn't even understand what the hell you would be talking about. Yakumo
It's better to analyze it like this: "Freud's prescription is this: Only by <V + ~ing> can <S> <V in base form>." With such long words and complex ideas, it's hard to see the superstructure in the sentence. But it is a form that people do use more often than you think: "Only by working hard can you succeed", etc etc. The next part doesn't need much simplifying -- it looks like a quote taken out of some philosophy paper. "But what would be the security of the good, if the bad could (at pleasure) invade them from the sky?" But yeah, a lot of school systems insist on teaching English through reading, grammar-translation, rather than conversation. Both are needed, but the former is useless if you're quoting passages from Milton or the Bible, and expecting first-time English students to be able to understand them.
Yes Japanese English is bad and mostly pointless. Some Japanese woman paid me Y20,000 as a gift as I spent a few hours with her, teaching here English she might use when she went abroad as an artist and she told me that she learnt more from me in 3 hours then she did in school for 6 months... The ones that make me laugh are the phrases that are shown on the Yamanote line for English schools, half the time I struggle to think of a time I might have used said phrase... normally tell Japanese friends not to bother learning this too much...
