I took French in high school, and while I've never had any occasion to speak the language outside of school, I still got a lot out of it.
I agree. I graduated from high school two weeks ago, and took four years of Spanish. I seldom use the language to do anything but annoy my family, but it certainly showed me a lot about English that I never knew. As far as I was concerned, the only English tenses were past, present, and future. Spanish showed me many more verb tenses that we happen to have in English.
The sad part is, I probably understand Spanish syntax better than English syntax, and I think I have above-average spelling capabilities and decent grammatical skills. Part of this may be the curriculum. My English teachers cared more about the horrible stories we read, and whether or not we could use MLA citation. Spelling and grammar were pretty secondary. That's why I think it's a load of crap to call the class "English" because it's not a language arts class. It should be called "literature," which is what my university calls it. In my Spanish classes, many a paper was returned to me with red pen marks for using preterite where I should have used imperfect, or improper use of the subjunctive tense, and so on.
If some of that made sense, great. If none of it did, well, that's okay, too.
The audible different between "should've" and "should of" is pretty much zero
Audible difference?::ducks flying objects::
That goes back to regions. I live in Rhode Island (most of us pronounce it "Rho Dylind"), and "should of" is distinguishable from "should've." "Should of" is "shood uv" and "should've" is "shoodv" -- it's almost as if there is no vowel at all in "should've."
Also, "wh" is basically gone here. I read on a website about pronounciation that "whet" is pronounced "hwet," which boggled my mind because I had never heard it pronounced that way. Here, we say "wet." I don't think we should spell it that way because "wet" and "whet" are separate words, but that's how we say it.
Of course, we use words like "bubblah" and "grindah," so what do I know?
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I took French in high school, and while I've never had any occasion to speak the language outside of school, I still got a lot out of it.
I agree. I graduated from high school two weeks ago, and took four years of Spanish. I seldom use the language to do anything but annoy my family, but it certainly showed me a lot about English that I never knew. As far as I was concerned, the only English tenses were past, present, and future. Spanish showed me many more verb tenses that we happen to have in English.
The sad part is, I probably understand Spanish syntax better than English syntax, and I think I have above-average spelling capabilities and decent grammatical skills. Part of this may be the curriculum. My English teachers cared more about the horrible stories we read, and whether or not we could use MLA citation. Spelling and grammar were pretty secondary. That's why I think it's a load of crap to call the class "English" because it's not a language arts class. It should be called "literature," which is what my university calls it. In my Spanish classes, many a paper was returned to me with red pen marks for using preterite where I should have used imperfect, or improper use of the subjunctive tense, and so on.
If some of that made sense, great. If none of it did, well, that's okay, too.
The audible different between "should've" and "should of" is pretty much zero Audible difference? ::ducks flying objects::
That goes back to regions. I live in Rhode Island (most of us pronounce it "Rho Dylind"), and "should of" is distinguishable from "should've." "Should of" is "shood uv" and "should've" is "shoodv" -- it's almost as if there is no vowel at all in "should've."
Also, "wh" is basically gone here. I read on a website about pronounciation that "whet" is pronounced "hwet," which boggled my mind because I had never heard it pronounced that way. Here, we say "wet." I don't think we should spell it that way because "wet" and "whet" are separate words, but that's how we say it.
Of course, we use words like "bubblah" and "grindah," so what do I know?