Look at this:
"I read the paper this morning"
"I want to read the bible"
Can you read those?
Yes you can….here's what's weird. "Read" it can be "Red" or "Reed" (pronounciation wise). I just noticed that....that it's kinda weird who we know how to use them, but what about a sentence that it could be either?
"I just read on"
Which is it?
Weird, I've never really noticed this before.
It's in the past tense. Said same as it was in your first sentance.
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It's in the past tense. Said same as it was in your first sentance.
But it could be
"What do you do when you run into a word you don't know"
"Oh I just REED on"
It could be both.
I went with that answer because saying it in the current tense sounds a little awkward.
"Oh I just REED on"
Here's the 10 million dollar question. We SAY that but is it proper grammar? I don't know for sure, I'm just offering the question because the things we say and what's actually considered proper English are often quite different.
"I play video games really good."
No, you play them 'well'.
Twist your mind around this. It was a post of mine on my online journal:
The other day my girlfriend asked me a TOEIC problem.
The sentence ran something like this:"You can use this card to accumulate for free miles
for all business travel."To the trained English-speaker's eye the problem
obviously lies in the first 'for' which should be
eliminated.However, when Haruka saw "all business" she thought
that 'travel' should have been 'travels' which I
shook my head 'no' to by instinct. And then came that
awful question:Why?
After two evenings of debating with myself I came to
the conclusion that here, business or for that matter
the adjective preceding 'travel' plays no part in
determining the nature of 'travel', rather it is whether
the sentence describes 'travel' as possessive or not.
For example: "All your business travels". Okay, so I
figured it out but I still can't figure outWHY!????
Maybe you can find it what is correct by the context?
As for travel/travels… Plural is used for:
A series of journeys.
An account of one's journeys.
according to dictionary.com. In my English->Japanese dictionary, it says:
長期にわたる（外国）旅行は複数形で複数扱い
Since two dictionaries says almost the same thing, I guess that's the usage. When in doubt, I follow dictionaries 
Language is so interesting when you just sit down and actually think about it.
(Join some of the scanlation groups out there and you get to debate over smallest grammar usage for hours… especially the group contains English n00b translator like me with full of questions.)
Language is so interesting when you just sit down and actually think about it.
It's crazy dude. When I was a HS senior my World Lit. teacher was a stickler for proper grammar. She obviously didn't succeed with me but regardless I still learned a LOT from her.
More than even her I learn from my girlfriend. I got this beauty one day:
"What's the difference between 'a', 'an' and 'the'?"
Boy, talk about feeling stupid. Beyond the obvious vowel and no vowel use of an and a, I had no idea how to reply. I looked them up in the dictionary and got some crazy insight (like 'an' actually is an abbreviation of 'one') and some really rockin' rules but it's really nuts how much we take the languages we speak for granted.
@omae:
Okay, so I figured it out but I still can't figure out
WHY!????
If I'm not mistaken, travel in this context does not refer to the actual act of moving from place to place, but instead refers to the act of arranging said movement. Pluralizing travel means that you're shifting the context of the word to mean actual movement rather than making arrangements.
Pluralizing travel means that you're shifting the context of the word to mean actual movement rather than making arrangements.
And that said if one pluralizes travel, that means we have to identify it with an individual ie. your, mine, her, his, etc. Is that correct?
@omae:
And that said if one pluralizes travel, that means we have to identify it with an individual ie. your, mine, her, his, etc. Is that correct?
Hmmm… personally, I'd use "your" before business travel with either connotation of the word, but it's not quite as necessary if you're using it in the context of "making arrangements with another agency" if you get my drift.
Now, here's my point. There has to be a difference between ' This will accumulate mileage through business travel', 'This will accumulate mileage through your business travels', and 'This will accumulate mileage through your business travel.'
'Your business travel.' sounds awkward and somewhat out of place to me. I suppose it's okay to use but what nuance is different?
Now I'm not sure if you should completely take my word for truth (I'm still in eighth grade, and LA is my least best subject, but I still get A's on my report card on it year after year), but since just and are adverbs in this case, if we were to remove the two and were left with "I read", wouldn't that be considered correct, as all you need in a sentence is a noun and verb? Like "I read manga like One Piece" and "you read manga like One Piece"?
I'm still in eighth grade
Don't you know what that means?
It means you know all of the stuff I should know but have mostly forgotten. Cherish that youth.
@omae:
It means you know all of the stuff I should know but have mostly forgotten. Cherish that youth.
I try. Eighth grade's pretty fun. I'll cherish the events. Like my perverse Science Teacher. :blink:
But yeah, as I stated earlier, if you were to take apart a sentence, say something like… "In the corridor, I nervously crept around the house" and bring it down to its most basic components, You'd get the subject and predicate, right? Breaking down the earlier sentence, "In the corridor" and "around the house" are prepositions, nervously is an adverb. Although enriching a sentence, all of those aren't necessary for the most basic sentence, the subject and predicate, "I crept". Applying the same logic to "I just read on", you'd be left with "I read", which could be read "I reed", or "I red".
Ha ha… I hate grammar. I remember teachers getting frustrated with us when we would make a correction, they would ask why that would be correct and we would reply "...Because". If I had to have learned English as a second language I think I would have gone insane.
bow - bow
tear - tear
wind - wind
live - live
Crap like that, too. There are way more, but it all drives me nuts. Math I can take, but grammar... >.>
I feel sorry for all the foreign nations who have to learn english because most Americans are too lazy to learn a foreign language themselves. English has to be one of the hardest languages to learn, ever.
I mean, hell, even we native speakers can't agree on what's grammatical or not!
Ha ha… I hate grammar. I remember teachers getting frustrated with us when we would make a correction, they would ask why that would be correct and we would reply "...Because". If I had to have learned English as a second language I think I would have gone insane.
bow - bow
tear - tear
wind - wind
live - liveCrap like that, too. There are way more, but it all drives me nuts. Math I can take, but grammar... >.>
Hahaha. Nice examples. I didn't even think of those, now I know why my friend from Cuba hated english so much.
Don't forget "lead".
Luffy will lead the Staw-Hat Pirates into battle.
Don Krieg tried to pump Luffy full of lead.
@Usopp:
Don't forget "lead".
Luffy will lead the Staw-Hat Pirates into battle.
Don Krieg tried to pump Luffy full of lead.
It could also be "leed" too, like "I'll lead you to my house"
It could also be "leed" too, like "I'll lead you to my house"
I know, that's what it says in the first example sentence I put.
Okay, I'll come clean: I'm in 11th grade, straight-A student. What the FUCK is a predicate?
Also present - present is one of them.
And lead can be pronounced two ways but used three ways.
"That bowl is made of lead."
"He lead them to their deaths."
"My favorite team is in the lead."
Predicate is like the verb and what comes after. What modifies the subject. Like in the sentence
"Kaku has a square nose."
"has a square nose" is the full predicate. …I think.
Also present - present is one of them.
And lead can be pronounced two ways but used three ways.
"That bowl is made of lead."
"He lead them to their deaths."
"My favorite team is in the lead."Predicate is like the verb and what comes after. What modifies the subject. Like in the sentence
"Kaku has a square nose."
"has a square nose" is the full predicate. …I think.
Thank you. Just please don't tell my teacher I took a minute or two for that… I can see why everyone hates us now: Our language sucks to get down.
No problem.
And I have them down, but there are also the your, you're, they're, their, there, its, and it's type things. Those drove me nuts for the longest time >.<
Actually, on LOST last week, on the subtitles, I noticed a gramattical error involving something like you're or they're. I felt dorky for noticing, though.
