2007年11月7日 星期三
A speech
I listened a speech lat week. It talked about how to prepare the exam for graduate school. The speaker was from a cram school. Of course we knew that he wants us can choose his cram school. But after I listened to the speech, I was considering which one is better, study further or have a job after I graduate. It confused me recently because some of good jobs need master degree or doctor degree, but I just have bachelor degree. I know that is not enough to have a good job. On the other hand, if I studied further, I don’t what goal I need to achieve. Therefore, I still think about which one is better for me. I hope I can find the answer before I graduate.
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Your post is filled with misusages. Are you just a sloppy writer and proofreader, or do you really not understand English well enough to know that you leave out too many words and consistently use the wrong tenses? This isn't a personal question, by the way. I'm asking everyone in the class. I ask everyone in all my classes the same question every day we meet. Everyone does it. I expect non-English majors to make these kinds of mistakes, but I do expect more from English Department students. I expect them to care a lot more about the quality of their English. Am I wrong to expect this? Do I want too much? I don't know.
There are many different kinds of language errors. Everybody makes them, non-native speakers of English who study English as well as native speakers of English who study English. Nobody's perfect. And, of course, the less English you know, the more errors you can expect to make. That is just common sense. Well, sometimes common sense turns out to be wrong, but I don't think this will turn out to be wrong. If it is and you know who says that it's wrong, I'd sure like to know.
Back to kinds of errors. Sloppy, simple errors (SSE) are the kind I expect from people who know little English and from people who care little about the quality of their English. Your first sentence has an example of an SSE: "I listened a speech". When the main-verb form "listened" is followed by a noun phrase like "a speech", a "to" must follow "listened". The verb is two words, listened to, not one word. The one-word verb form that works here is "heard": "I heard a speech last week". Different verbs have different usage rules. But these two verb are such basic English verbs that I don't expect a third-year student to make this kind of usage error. Therefore, I conclude that you are simply sloppy and that you didn't bother to proofread your work.
These blogs are your work, you realize. They aren't just Internet fun and games. You (and I mean everyone in the class, Eunice, not just you) will be graded in part on your attention to this kind of detail.
The second usage error is not in the same category. It's more than simple and sloppy. It requires more thought: "It talked about how to prepare the exam for graduate school." You have to think about the meaning of the words you use. What do these words really say? They tell me that you listened to a speech by someone who was telling you how to create (This is a synonym of "prepare") the examination for graduate school. I don't believe this. I think that you meant to say this: "It talked about how to prepare for the exam for graduate school." You made the same mistake with this verb as you did with "listen/listen to". The verb you want is a two-word verb, a phrasal verb. "To prepare" in the sense suggested by your sentence means "to make" or, in this particular case, "to write". But you are an undergraduate student who might be thinking about going to graduate school in eighteen months. Therefore, I suspect that you meant to use "prepare for", which means "to get ready for" or, specifically in this case, "to study for". I think that this is a higher-level error of the same type: it seems to require more understanding and analytical ability than "listen" versus "listen to". Maybe that's because "listen" and "listen to" are probably used more frequently than "prepare" and "prepare for".
The third and fourth misusages: "that he [3] wants us [4] can choose his cram school". Error [3] is a tense problem: it should be "wanted", not "wants"; and error [4] is a word-choice/usage error: it should be "to", not "can".
The fifth through seventh are these: "because [5] some of good jobs need [6] master degree or doctor degree, but I [7] just have bachelor degree." All of this sounds like pidgin because the articles are left out Number [5] is a usage problem: it should be "some of the good jobs" or "some good jobs"; [6] is "a master's or doctor's degree" (I would also prefer "require" to "use", but that's a much more high-level problem); and [7] is the same usage problem: you need "a" before "bachelor's", and a semantics (meaning) problem: you don't have a BA yet, so you need to say "will have {just/only} a bachelor's degree".
You have more serious problems to deal with in your life, though. What is your career goal? How much education do you need to achieve it? What kind of education do you need?
I hope you can find the answers before you graduate, but most of us don't. Most of us need to work in the business world before we know what we want. I had to. And I'm not even sure that I'm doing what I really want to do. I've never enjoyed my work as much as I do now, though, and I've never stayed anywhere doing the same thing as I've done here in Taiwan for the past eleven years. I know that I'm having fun, learning something valuable, and getting the kind of job satisfaction that most people don't get in their work life. I still don't think that I have a career (Collins Cobuild says that "a career is the job or profession that someone does for a long period of their life", but I think that's a misleading definition. A career, it seems to me, leads from the bottom rung of the ladder to the top -- or however high one can climb the career ladder, say from mail clerk to president of a big corporation. I prefer the Merriam-Webster Unabridged definition: "3: a course of continued progress [as in the life of a person or nation] : a field for or pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement especially in public, professional, or business life").
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