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Originally posted by dmitri11 View Post"I’m the native English speaker"?
Adam could use the definitive article in a hypothetical case => assume you meet two (or more) people in road and you are thinking who is native etc.....
P.S.
I am not a native, neither an ESL teacher!Last edited by YiagosEE; 05-02-2018, 12:08 PM.
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Originally posted by dmitri11 View PostHi. So what's the difference between "I’m a native English speaker" and "I’m the native English speaker"?
"I’m a native English speaker" <----- Contextually, one example of more than one native speaker present. Native speakers present - "I" + one more native speakers.
That covers about 98%+ of all possible cases. Others would take much longer to explain and would require context beyond short simple sentences.
Originally posted by dmitri11 View PostThis (undefined article) is too hard to face in Russian if you speak English here.
Articles in my opinion are one of the 3 or 4 hardest grammatical aspects of English to get "100% correct". In general, many of the rules you have slavishly learnt up to about B2/Upper Intermediate get broken once you begin to enter C1 and beyond. Also, whether you use articles or not becomes very nuanced.
The teaching of articles is one area where Soviet foreign language teaching methodologies - specifically, endless translation of sentences - break down very very badly. Articles don't really exist in Russian so there is no nice one to one syntactical mapping going from Russian to English.
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Originally posted by aussieinbg View Post
"I’m the native English speaker" <----- Contextually, there is only one possible native speaker that is being described - only "I".
"I’m a native English speaker" <----- Contextually, one example of more than one native speaker present. Native speakers present - "I" + one more native speakers.
That covers about 98%+ of all possible cases. Others would take much longer to explain and would require context beyond short simple sentences.
I've seen many non-native ESL teachers get articles wrong - even the ones who have been through philology degrees at "good" universities.
Articles in my opinion are one of the 3 or 4 hardest grammatical aspects of English to get "100% correct". In general, many of the rules you have slavishly learnt up to about B2/Upper Intermediate get broken once you begin to enter C1 and beyond. Also, whether you use articles or not becomes very nuanced.
The teaching of articles is one area where Soviet foreign language teaching methodologies - specifically, endless translation of sentences - break down very very badly. Articles don't really exist in Russian so there is no nice one to one syntactical mapping going from Russian to English.
Many ways to get rid of context in Russian are difficult, reasons can be conscious (game, tipping, ...) and unconscious (weak logical and lexical (semantic) analysis, the work of the subscription). When we talk about the subconscious component of the context, we must distinguish between mental illness and something divine.Last edited by dmitri11; 08-09-2018, 03:39 PM.
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Originally posted by dmitri11 View PostIn Russian, the context has nothing to do with grammar. Context is what we "read between the lines". Good tone of the conversation suggests a lack of context, unless we're talking about art ... "there's a pencil in the cramped, but the thoughts are spacious" (thinking in N-dimensions). The very understanding of the context in Russian and English is different.
Originally posted by dmitri11 View PostMany ways to get rid of context in Russian are difficult, reasons can be conscious (game, tipping, ...) and unconscious (weak logical and lexical (semantic) analysis, the work of the subscription). When we talk about the subconscious component of the context, we must distinguish between mental illness and something divine.
Using articles in English makes the language more rigid and more difficult to manipulate - which can be either a very good thing or a very bad one depending of course on the context/situation. For technical or scientific literature, this is the perfect situation. However, for literature it can make things very dry and other means must be employed to give it shape.
Using English is like steel - under heat and with skill, it can be made malleable and shaped into what you want. However, great care is needed not to get burnt.
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