Daily Dose of English 164
"Proper" Grammar
Daily Dose of English 164
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, oh my God, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about proper grammar. Okay, during that introduction, there was a cat that very quickly ran over my desk. He saw something and boom, ran. I don't know if you could hear him, probably. But he threw a thing off my desk and was very surprising. But we're all good. Everything's fine. Nobody's injured. I was just a little startled. But anyways. Today we're gonna be talking about proper grammar because, and I put proper in quotes specifically. Those quotes you might hear called scare quotes or quotation marks or just quotes, air quotes even. Those are the ones that you do with your fingers to say proper grammar. Because that's the main thing that I wanna talk about, that proper grammar, big air quotes there, isn't a real thing. There is a decision by people at some point on what is considered proper grammar. It is not a natural thing that appears with language. That is a common misconception that grammar came before the language, but actually it's the other way around. And the best way that I can explain this is that grammar is an explanation of how a language generally functions. And I say generally very specifically because it is not the only way that the language functions and that's why there's a ton of exceptions and like tons of things that don't match official proper grammar because it is just an explanation of some things that are happening in the language. But the actual language itself is more important since it carries meaning and does things in ways that are patterns and that explanation of those patterns is grammar. And so if you learn proper grammar, you're just, you're essentially learning the rules of a sport without necessarily learning to play the sport, right? Because if you read the rules for a sport like basketball, there's a lot of pretty specific rules. But if you've ever played basketball, you know that some of them sometimes don't get held up because there's a bit of judgment in them. Especially on fouling, for example, a referee has to make a call live and decide whether or not that was a foul. However, many times they are a little bit wrong. And that's fine. That's a normal thing. That's a part of the game. They're doing the best that they can. They're trying to stick to the rules and understand them and give them names. But occasionally they have to just go with their intuition as a referee to say that was or was not a foul or that was or was not traveling in basketball is when you walk with the ball. Because if you go back and you look and you Compare with the rules, there are some times that people travel when it wasn't called because that's not the vibe that the referee might have gotten or whatever. And so that's the same thing with proper grammar. It's this abstraction of the language, or rather a specific version of the language. And I think another reason why you should not worry about proper grammar is that nobody, no real person actually uses it during their regular speech. First off, everybody makes mistakes, that's very normal, but then there's also plenty of things that are correct for a dialect or an accent that aren't considered proper quotes. So especially with English, because there are so many native speakers of the language from so many different parts of the world, there are vast differences in grammar and how things function. There are things that are grammatically correct to say in certain dialects but don't work at all in others. I'm kind of blanking on a better, on a specific example, but a good one that I've heard from British people is that there is a tendency to say, to use like have for the past tense when something has just happened. So, has just happened or he has fallen can be used to say something that just happened, right? Have you fallen is a bit, I mean, it's not all, not all dialects, but some is a thing that you might hear. Have you fallen? It's like, did you just fall? But in American English, that would be, that would be like in the, in have you ever fallen in your life ever once, right? But did you fall would be a more, more apt thing for something that just happened, right? And that might not even be proper in British English, but I've heard it said. And so it's like from native speakers. And that's my sort of point here with proper grammar. A lot of English learners will get wrapped up in grammar rules and proper grammar because English is seen as a prestige language, which is the name for a language that carries well, prestige with it for either economic reasons, business reasons, things like that. People who speak English tend to have a higher prestige in these areas. Not really like day-to-day because there's a lot of people that speak English day-to-day but It's called a prestige language. And then prestige languages tend to have more focus on grammar. Same exact thing happened with French, or I guess happens with French. And people get really wrapped up in having this perfect French or perfect English, even though a lot of people don't speak like that. And so don't worry if your grammar is not proper. Your grammar just has to be clear, right? If what you say means something to somebody else, that's fine. A good example is when people say, me and my friend are going to the store, right? The proper way to say that is technically my friend and I are going to the store. But people have been saying, me and my friend have been going to the store forever. That's a really common thing to say. Who cares? It's clear. It makes sense. It's a normal thing that people say. Um, and so that to me is, is proper. Like if you say me and my friend are going, it's might even be a bit weird to say my friend and I are going to the store. That's actually sounds more fancy and a little bit weirder in my dialect. Um, I do make fun of my mother specifically because she overcorrected the other way when she says, um, that belongs to my friend and I, right, or whatever. Would that's, that's an overcorrection. Um, because what happened is a lot of people say my friend and I were going to the store or my friend, me and my friend are going to the store. That's a very common thing to say, but then a lot of people get told that's wrong. It's my friend and I, that's wrong. You're wrong. You have to say it right. um which kind of creates this a fear of being wrong basically and then people will over correct and always say blank and i instead of me and blank when it's correct right and so in the case of um this is for um my friend and i actually that is wrong in the proper grammar sense, but people will say it pretty often because they're overcorrecting. Again, it's also not a problem. Proper grammar is a made-up thing, so it's not that important. If you're trying to pass a test specifically, it is kind of important, but Um, I don't know, unless you need the test, I think they're kind of dumb. Uh, even like the requirements, it's like you can just study for them because if you actually want to have proper grammar, there's just some rules you memorize, but you should still already speak English, right? It wouldn't be too hard for me to memorize these rules because I already speak English, and if you already speak English, you could probably just memorize them pretty well as well. But there's a huge difference between memorizing rules and actually being able to use the language to express things. And that's what's a lot more important. Um, proper grammar is also very commonly used as a way of erasure, uh, of language erasure. Erasure is when somebody or a group of people try to erase something to remove something or to, uh, Yeah, to remove something or to make something go away, I guess, right? And so, for example, English is not native to the United States, to that region of the world, right? It is a language that came from Europe, from England. English, England. And the people that came over really erased a lot of the languages that were already here. There's many of them do still exist, but some have died out. But this erasure, this proper grammar is often used for other kinds of erasure within the language. So, for example, there's many dialects of English that are very distinct, right? One of the most famous ones is Black English or African American English, anything like that. There's some good videos you can look up on them, but It functions basically as a dialect of English. There's different grammar patterns, there's different things that are allowed and not allowed. It has a full structure of a dialect, right? But a lot of schools and people in positions of power usually try to say that it is wrong, that it is improper grammar, and use it as a way to try to erase people's experience. Thankfully, that hasn't gone away, and then that we saw this very interesting dialects of English all over the world, because language is actually pretty hard, unless you are being very horrible to people because people are gonna speak the way that they speak and that's pretty awesome. So to wrap up this episode, speak the way that sounds natural to you. Since you're learning, definitely listen to native speakers more. If they don't understand you, there's probably an issue, but also don't worry about making your grammar be perfect and proper because that's also kind of boring, right? Make it more interesting. Be your own person. Even if it's a little mistake that nobody else makes, as long as it's clear, Who really cares, right? You're a cool person, I think so, but yeah. Anyways, thank you for listening to this episode on proper, big air quotes there, grammar. I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learned a little something. And I will see you again tomorrow for a whole other episode, a brand new episode. I'll see you then. Have a good one. Bye.
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