Language; television
Sep. 28th, 2007 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sister_luckMarking makes me cranky. After reading lots of weird sentences I'm sure that my instincts fail me completely and I end up questioning everything. Aided by a bilingual dictionary my students come up with the most outrageous translations - we were only allowed a monolingual one back in the day and it's rather difficult to convince my students that the bilingual dictionary is no big help if you end up using the completely wrong words and then I'm having to sort out what they meant to say in the first place.
Then there's collocations. I'm rather wary of the phrases that have crept into the English as taught by German teachers that are not quite the right usage and I'm always afraid I'm doing the same. (Hell, I know I've done it - I used to think that you could hold a speech and it didn't mean having your hands on the manuscript but actually like giving it.) So, at the moment I'm struggling with advertising language and the AIDA formula and asking myself what kind of verbs go with the nouns attention (attract, grab, draw attention to), interest (attract and what else?), desire (wake?) and action (take, that's easy!). I'm thoroughly confusing myself here.
Tomorrow I'll watch rugby on tv, because I can.
I've watched the season premiere of Heroes which was okay, but Mohinder is really annoying me, Dexter which piled on the pressure for our serial killer and a rather self-indulgent but kind of endearing special about Ian Rankin's Edinburgh.
Then there's collocations. I'm rather wary of the phrases that have crept into the English as taught by German teachers that are not quite the right usage and I'm always afraid I'm doing the same. (Hell, I know I've done it - I used to think that you could hold a speech and it didn't mean having your hands on the manuscript but actually like giving it.) So, at the moment I'm struggling with advertising language and the AIDA formula and asking myself what kind of verbs go with the nouns attention (attract, grab, draw attention to), interest (attract and what else?), desire (wake?) and action (take, that's easy!). I'm thoroughly confusing myself here.
Tomorrow I'll watch rugby on tv, because I can.
I've watched the season premiere of Heroes which was okay, but Mohinder is really annoying me, Dexter which piled on the pressure for our serial killer and a rather self-indulgent but kind of endearing special about Ian Rankin's Edinburgh.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-29 11:07 am (UTC)And than the sentences where I know it's wrong, but don't know how to say it right either, because I've been reading crooked Dutch for so long.
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Date: 2007-09-29 11:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-29 01:30 pm (UTC)I do get confused with German as well but as a native speaker I feel a bit more confident about my language instincts - and of course, in this particular course I have to fiddle with nearly every sentence.
Oh, and it's a common occurence that when you're writing about the linguistic mishaps of others you make at least one mistake of your own. There's a word for it, but I can't find it right now. It's somewhere on languagelog (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/).