Ryan Cecil Smith

Grammar Issues

1. After a full year, the majority of my students still begin every other sentence with and, but, or because. So is another problem word. Why can’t their teachers explain this to them? It must be that the grammar books say it’s okay. The grammar books are WRONG. The students sound retarded.
2. Another “high-level student” shocker is that so many of them – a third? – say “My hobby is to play tennis.” They should say, “My hobby is playing tennis.” Read this a hundred times and its wrongness will really sink in. Also, students do not know how to apply articles to general words. For example, “I like reading a book.” They should say, “I like reading books.” I know that Japanese doesn’t have distinctions like these because it doesn’t use articles, but I can’t believe that after a full year, my students can’t do it right in the most simple, basic instance of conversation.
3. A lot vs much vs many is an interesting issue that I had to look up online to explain. Students say “much” way too much. This could be explained pretty easily.
4. I’m surprised that the students make a lot of mistakes with excited vs. exciting or interested vs. interesting. “I am exciting to read this interested book.” Such a simple thing that they have missed.
5. Students still think the following is a sentence: “For example, basketball, baseball, handball, and so on.” Argh. They should say, “…such as basketball, baseball, and handball.”
6. Students overuse indirect verbs, but that would take too long to explain, so here’s a quick example: “I love Japanese music. For example, Remioromen, Kobukuro, Spitz and Mr. children were loved by me.”
7. I don’t think it should take too long to correct “One of my dog is a labrador” or “One of my dogs are labrador” into: “One of my dogs is a labrador.”
8. My students often overuse the preposition it, but that’s really because they use it in strangely constructed paragraphs. “My hobby is cooking. I started it when I was 12.” This could be explained to the students, but it’s not so simple, so I don’t hold it against them. Sure is annoying, though, and in a different world, in which the students practice English more often than they just translate it, they would already understand.
9. This is unacceptable: the adverbial phrase is “every day,” the adjective is “everyday,” and they are never interchangeable. In fact, most of my students would never use “everyday,” so why do I only see this and never the other way?