Native English speakers please help me with this!?
It's about a song: All my memories gather round her, miner's lady, stranger to blue water. Dark and dusty, painted on the sky, misty taste of moonshine, teardrop in my eye. Country roads, take me home to the place I belong. West Virginia, mountain momma, take me home, country roads. ***I hear her voice in the morning hour she calls me****, the radio reminds me of my home far away. 1) ***I hear her voice in the morning hour she calls me**** This line sounds like this to me: I hear her voice in the morning hours SHE CALLS ME - Not the hours she talks to my sister. "She calls me" is modifying "the morning hours". So, in this case, we could add a "when" before "shen calls me" to make it clearer as in sentence 2): 2) I hear her voice in the morning hours WHEN she calls me. Just like: 3) I went to Italy on the day WHEN he got a job there. Questions: How would sentence 1) sound to a native speaker of English? Is the "WHEN" in sentences 2)&3) necessary? Thanks a lot!
Do most native English speakers use articles correctly? If I'm not sure how to frame a phrase and ask a random person to help me, should I consider their answer as the right option and remember it without hesitation?
The short answer is, yes they do. But you will encounter two difficulties:It's likely that a random person will be correct, but the difficulty is that use of articles is highly dependent on context and intended meaning. Take a very simple sentence structure like: Pronoun + verb + article + noun. Examples:I hit a homer. This means at one time in my life, I hit a home run playing baseball.I hit the homer. This means I hit a home run in a specific game and likely implies that this hit was a significant contribution to the game.I hit Homer. Remember in speech, you can't hear the capital H. This means you physically assaulted someone named Homer (he probably deserved it, though).There are are even more variations with words like some and any.If you do get an answer, how will you know it is the correct one, since there are actually few cases in which substituting a different article is wrong - it just changes the meaning. If you ask then for an explanation, you are unlikely to get something satisfactory since most English speakers know what is correct without knowing why.So use this approach but be cautious about generalizing what you hear without understanding context, meaning and reliability of the speaker.Thanks for the (or even an) A2A.
What do you think of non-English speakers that criticize native English speakers about how bad their English is?
I am a native speaker of US English. I have worked overseas for much of my career - 25+ years. I have also worked in the US with a goodly number of non-native speakers of English.I don’t recall ever hearing a non-native speaker criticize a native English speaker’s English. It is not uncommon for non-native speakers to ask one to speak slower (not an unreasonable request). Usually non-native speakers apologize on “their poor English” and my response is that their English is much better than my (whatever their month tongue is).I have had a number of people call in to question things that I have written (reports, brochures, Quora posts), and I always approach them as posing a valid question, but they are usually wrong. My Webster’s dictionary and Googling English grammar points have usually shown me to be correct. I recall one time where my tablet’s eagerness to “correct” my spelling did lead to a error, which I acknowledged. There may have been others, but not many.If I were to run into such a person, I would think them rather bizarre. There is no denying though that there are native speakers of US/British/whatever English who brutalize the language.
Do the native English speakers have better writing than Non native speaker?
Not necessarily.The problem is that written English is in many ways a different language from spoken English. It has formal rules about language usage that are different from the rules of spoken English -- rules about grammar, rules about spelling, rules about vocabulary, etc.For instance, spoken English features informal expressions like "six year ago" or "I should've went" that are not grammatically acceptable in written English. Good written English also requires a mastery of vocabulary that may escape less sophisticated native speakers, and sometimes even good writers (e.g., the difference between "flout" and "flaunt"). And the ability to speak English does not guarantee an ability to spell properly. Furthermore, many native speakers are not trained in writing connected prose and have varying degrees of difficulty in putting together coherent passages. "Writing as you speak" is a good start to putting words down on paper, but anything so written almost invariably requires editing, pruning, and rearranging in order to satisfy the canons of good writing. In other words, not all English native speakers are good at writing Standard Written English.On the other hand, many non-native speakers who learn the formal grammar of English, have a good command of vocabulary and spelling, and are used to expressing their thoughts in written form can be highly proficient at Standard Written English. They may actually be better than native speakers because they're unlikely to make mistakes like using "laid" instead of "lain", for instance, which are in a state of confusion in many spoken varieties of English. If they are good at arranging their thoughts on paper, they are already miles ahead of many native speakers.It is therefore not at all the case that native English speakers necessarily have better writing skills than non-native speakers.
I need English Help please!?
1. Confuse 2. His wife is beautiful, young, and wealthy 3. Peculiar 4. They are abnormally large. 5. Has inner qualities that make him admirable 6. Aversion 7. transience...veracity 8. fervent...dissonant 9. libertarian 10. lavishly...meager 11. correct 12. and the (The "the" is unnecessary) 13. those are 14. No error (Though, there should be a comma after "week.") 15. alot of fish (It should be a lot, not alot.)