Reality Is Not Grammatically Correct

I Want To Be More Like Me And Less Like You

“I’m going to try be more like you,” Masashi says.

I think, uh-oh.

I ask him what he means. He explains that he’s going to try to not exhaustively prepare his lessons anymore. He’s seen me prep a lesson in less than a minute. (That is, he once saw me, when a student unexpectedly showed up for a class that had been canceled, grab the envelope with the jumble of materials off the shelf and walk in and teach a lesson. This made an impression on him, and now he wants to back down from the type-A kind of prep he does.) The funny thing is: This week is the week I decided to put more effort into prepping my lessons. I want to be more like him this week.

Language Is A Virus From Outer Space. You’re Either Immune Or You’re Sick As A Dog From It

I tell Jun and Masashi that secondary language acquisition is a talent. Many people don’t have this talent and hard work only gets them so far. Jun and Masashi are about as fluent as they come. Jun, as I have said, learned English after being enrolled in a London boarding school. Masashi learned English in Japan, with dictionaries and textbooks and elbow grease that you can’t imagine. Jun points to himself and Masashi, saying, “Yes, we are very talented.” I say, “Well, no, Masashi is smart and you didn’t have a choice.”

The Real Reason Foreign Teachers Drink So Much.

This week’s lessons are centered around the concept of countable and uncountable nouns. What are these? Often, even I can’t classify nouns without a lot of thought. What is countable? Beer? Yes. What is uncountable? Beer? Yes. Students are confused Just memorize them, I tell students. Don’t think, just do.

In the break room, there are questions from the nearly perfectly fluent Japanese teachers. “Can I say...?” questions. “Can I say, ‘I had a little chocolate?’” Yes. “I had some chocolate?” Yes. “I had a piece of chocolate?” Yes. “I had three chocolates?” Yes. “When do you use each one?” Depends on the person. Depends on the chocolate, the kind of chocolate. Depends on the situation. Depends on reality. (Reality itself is dependent.) Depends on how much guilt you feel over having eaten the chocolate.

I will never again see English as a language that makes sense.

With other native speakers, I argue grammar all the time. This is like a dream come true. I teach a man (a Canadian who has been teaching English in Japan for the last eleven months) the word gerund. It’s loud in the bar where we are having this conversation and I have to repeat this word, this word he’s never heard before, several times before he gets it. “Gerun?” No, gerund. “Gerung?” Gerund. D. D. “Ohhh. Gerund! I’ve never heard that word before.”

And I don’t mean to make fun of him. Grammar is not fun for most people and it’s not easy for anyone. But I love it for a reason, for the fact that its supposed to be, in part, a systematic way of explaining how to correctly speak a language, but its twisty little turns often lead down paths where logic has no foothold. Something can be grammatically correct--perfectly so by all the rules I can find--but it will sound wrong to a native speaker. There is gray area between the rules and the usage, and I love exploring this uncharted territory. I live my dream of being an explorer in a kind of grammatical no-man’s land. I love that something can be perfectly grammatically correct but a native speaker would never say it this way and it would sound funny to another native speaker. Think of Churchill’s “This is something up with which I will not put”--a joke he made after a speech editor corrected his "improper" use of a preposition to end a sentence.

We argue about grammar now in bars, in the prep room. The students often use this construction to describe activites: “I will go to” or “I am going to” followed by an activity. (I will go to bowling. I am going to shopping.) This is wrong in most cases. Most cases? Yes, after weeks and weeks, Ben finally comes up with a situation in which it could be correct to say, “I am going to (activity).” Ben says, “I belong to a bowling league and one morning I sleep late. My mother wakes me up and asks, ‘Ben, are you going to bowling?’ I say, ‘Yes, I’m going to bowling.’”

Seth is nearly livid. “But that’s wrong.” He adds, “And you couldn’t say ‘I’m going to cricketing.’”

I argue that it’s right. It’s wrong grammatically (or is it?), but native speakers do this all the time. We change language all the time to suit our situations, our positions, reality.

And “cricketing” isn’t a word, by the way, so that makes it wrong. The sentence, grammatically is correct, but not in all situations. Huh? Or is it grammatically correct? Weeelll, it’s not necessarily grammatically incorrect, but...

There’s a reason the foreign teachers drink so much in this town.