Are English standards declining in school?

[TooNice]

@badass: Every languages that I've learnt appear to have -something- that is needlessly complicated. I've far from mastered the English language (don't bother counting mistakes in this post), but I'd say that English is one of the less complicated of the ones I've learnt.

French: Has the most needlessly complicated grammar filled with exceptions. Gender for objects is illogical (but I hear that German is even worse in that aspect). More conjugations than English. Spelling is at least as hard as English (e.g. maître, mettre, mètre).

Japanese: Purely phonetic, so arguably the simplest to pronounce and spell. But it's not enough quirks, especially for borrowed foreign words. ’Biru' means beer, while 'Biiru' (hold the 'Bi' for a bit longer) means building. Say/write it wrong and you end up with 'I am drinking a building inside a beer'. It's not really a tonal language like Chinese, but the tone does matter some time. For instance, depending on the intonation, 'Hashi' can mean chopsticks or bridge. Sometime though, you can't distinguish by tone, so have to rely on context. This is when Kanji comes into play. Kanji is meant to make Japanese 'readable' yet I find it so inefficient when you are writing. Something like 口 is simple, but something like 雲 has so many strokes that it unavoidably takes longer to write, is harder to write correctly (and to scale), and when the font is too small, hardly readable!

I am not going to carry on with my list. But yeah, I've asked myself why there isn't an universally language that is logical and efficient. Apparently, there is something in the work, it's just not universal (and most likely never will be - try making every country give up their languages).

Personally, if there's something I'm not sure about, I'll run it by the spellchecker or Google it.

I do that all the time, but I still often make mistakes such as typing 'are', 'but' etc., twice for no apparent reason, or worse, getting word order wrong especially when I am writing long posts at 3AM in the morning. That's why 75% of my posts on Hexus end up edited (Word is pretty neat because it highlights instances where I type the same word twice). And that's before I re-read my post before posting. Oddly enough, I don't think that it happens when I write with a pen (unless I do not enough notice it).

[Noxvayl]

I don't know if standards are lower now than they were when I was at school, and I don't know how I could tell.

What I do know is that standards on forums are lower than school standards in my day, but is that any surprise?

My spelling is generally very good. My typing, on the other hand, lets me down. And to top it off, if I'm typing a post for a forum, I'm not about to spend the time it takes to carefully proof-read every word. I do that when I'm getting paid for what I write, and you lot aren't paying me so you'll have to put up with typos.

Also, while my grammar is pretty good, that doesn't mean you won't find, for instance, apostrophes in the wrong place. It isn't that I don't know where to put them, it's ..... oh all right, it's laziness. I'm quite capable of thinking one thing and typing another. If I spot an apostrophe in the wrong place in one of my posts, or a "they're" when I meant "there" or "their". on one of several similar things, I'll correct it. And I generally give posts a quick scan through. But if I miss one, I won't lose marks because of it, so you lot get what you get.

And finally, I'll use some techniques .... like this .... in a post, because it's a conversational style that works, even if it is grammatically incorrect.

In school work (which would have been handwritten, not typed, or in exams, or in paid work or business communications, I do take care not to let mistakes slip through .... and a few still do.

So you lot can't even tell what my educational standards are like, because mistakes are more about the medium I'm using, the care and attention I give to picking the up and to my typing skills (or lack thereof), than they are about what I do or don't know, or what I learned in my schooldays.

And therefore, as I'm not often exposed to the work of youngsters in an environment where standards matter and they might exercise care, I can't tell whether the generally lousy standard on forum posts is lack of knowing better, or as with me, lack of willingness to spend extra time making sure fings are wright.

I highly doubt the rubbish use of the English language can be attributed to laziness as you described it. For you laziness is not checking your post a second time before posting, as it is with me, but for others laziness is not bothering to type or pronounce all the letters in the word. Or bother to construct a sentence which makes sense.

As such I often find people praising my writing skills back on my own forum(probably just to suck up to the boss... but I'll take it) and I really enjoy reading your posts because they are well structured and thought out. The errors you make are not due to lack of understanding the English language but rather not spotting a mistake you made.

So yes laziness is a contributing factor with bad English but I find most people's attempts at constructing a post to be lacking in the knowledge department, not being lazy.

For example:
"it keeped me very entertained."
"No my friend, if you knew anything, or did any research you would know that Intel and AMD are not the only Supercomputer Chip makers."

2 examples of bad grammar from this very forum which I feel has a very high standard in terms of English comprehension. If I looked elsewhere I can't imagine the disastrous use of the English language I would find.

As for this:

And finally, I'll use some techniques .... like this .... in a post, because it's a conversational style that works, even if it is grammatically incorrect.

According to my English education that is grammatically correct use of ellipsis dots.

The purpose of ellipsis dots, to my understanding, is to provide 1 of 2 functions when writing.
1. To leave out information that is unnecessary; ie when using a quote
2. To impose a pause on the reader. Whether that be to emphasis the word(s) between them as more important or to indicate you want the reader to think about what you have been writing. Could also be used to indicated an unfinished thought.

So your use for me would be correct according to number 2

Support from a different source> http://www.libraryonline.com/default.asp?pID=35

Not exactly how I said it above but close enough

[mycarsavw]

English, with a capital E.

[Noxvayl]

English, with a capital E.

LOL

I did say I was lazy didn't I

[Saracen]

I highly doubt the rubbish use of the English language can be attributed to laziness as you described it. For you laziness is not checking your post a second time before posting, as it is with me, but for others laziness is not bothering to type or pronounce all the letters in the word. Or bother to construct a sentence which makes sense.

As such I often find people praising my writing skills back on my own forum(probably just to suck up to the boss... but I'll take it) and I really enjoy reading your posts because they are well structured and thought out. The errors you make are not due to lack of understanding the English language but rather not spotting a mistake you made.

So yes laziness is a contributing factor with bad English but I find most people's attempts at constructing a post to be lacking in the knowledge department, not being lazy.

Oh I'm sure it's not only laziness, but on my part, it certainly includes that. It's just that I don't take it to extremes to be lazy, just as I don't take it to extremes to be punctiliously correct.

For example, for paid work, I write more carefully. Then I whip through the work quickly using Word's spelling and grammar checker to highlight and correct obvious typos. For a forum post, that's about where I stop. But for paid work, I'll then read through it carefully, because while spellcheckers will pick up a lot of stupid typos, they won't get everything, and they certainly aren't capable of picking up context, etc. Then having read it carefully, I'll usually leave it a day or two, then read it again. Then, after that, it'll get printed and read again off paper. I'm not sure why, but I often spot silly things reading from a printed copy that I missed several times. And if it's really important, I'll get the wife to proof-read it as a final check. She still sometimes finds things.

I'm sure that part of the problem is to do with short-term memory. If I'm reading something I wrote recently, I can remember writing it and the eye seems to see what I meant, which isn't necessarily what I typed. And when we read, at least in a language in which we are fluent and confortable, we tend to scan rather than read every letter or word. The old tricks about how many "f's" there are in a sentence, or the one about leaving out vowels except that the start of words proves how true that is. Or rather, it demonstrates it rather than proves it. And that is an example of the kind of thing I expect to find on a thorough proof-read. Those examples are certainly suggestive of my assertion being true, but they're far from a rigorous "proof". It's not just poor typing, spelling and grammar that I'd check for in paid work, but the exact sense of what I meant, and whether I achieve it with what I said. And it can be very hard to distance yourself from what you know you meant, to what someone that doesn't know that will make of what you wrote. If you aren't very careful, and clear, you can end up with people thinking you meant something totally different from what you did mean.

So, I'm "lazy" in that context. Maybe people that don't write for a living are no more lazy, but may well (I hope) not be as careful with words when they aren't being lazy. i.e. maybe they start from a different base point of laziness to me .... or require a different amount of effort to just get spelling right. I look at a word and if the spelling is wrong, then (most of the time) it leaps out at me ..... figuratively speaking.

....

According to my English education that is grammatically correct use of ellipsis dots.

The purpose of ellipsis dots, to my understanding, is to provide 1 of 2 functions when writing.
1. To leave out information that is unnecessary; ie when using a quote
2. To impose a pause on the reader. Whether that be to emphasis the word(s) between them as more important or to indicate you want the reader to think about what you have been writing. Could also be used to indicated an unfinished thought.

So your use for me would be correct according to number 2

Support from a different source> http://www.libraryonline.com/default.asp?pID=35

Not exactly how I said it above but close enough

Erm, yeah. What I meant wasn't so much that it was incorrect use of ellipsis in that instance, but that often, when I use ellipsis, it isn't always for the right reasons. Nor am I unaware of when I start a sentence with an "and" or "but", for example, or whether I make correct use of colons and semi-colons.

But (see what I mean ) that I do something isn't necessarily a sign of not realising I'm doing it, or of laziness. My main concern in forum posts is .... Do I get my meaning across?"

I'll often use a "conversational" style, because it's more likely to be easy to read than a more elliptical turn of phrase or grammatical structure which, while correct, it harder to grasp. So some of what I say might break a few rules, but it isn't necessarily that I don't know that, but that I chose to do it, either because I'm too lazy to check it or because I think it aids readability.

The point was that someone reading my words and finding spelling errors or grammatical errors can't be sure whether it's to do with my educational standards, or laziness, or simply an attempt at posting in a way that I feel is appropriate for a forum.

So .... I know that while some things can be deduced from what I write, some things can't. And as a result, I'm reluctant to assume that someone posting in text speech isn't doing it from a similar laziness to mine rather than not knowing any better, or that someone with lousy spelling isn't dyslexic (though it may also be a commonly-claimed excuse for poor spelling), and so on.

If how much you can tell about me has limits because it's possible to read things in to how I say things, then I could easily be mistaken if I read too much into how someone else posts. Lousy speaking and grammar might reflect falling educational standards since my day , but they also might not. And I can't tell either way for sure. I certainly have an opinion on whether standards, at least in formal matters, are as good, but is it an opinion based on hard evidence, or simply gut feeling and irrational preconceptions?

[badass]

@badass: Every languages that I've learnt appear to have -something- that is needlessly complicated. I've far from mastered the English language (don't bother counting mistakes in this post), but I'd say that English is one of the less complicated of the ones I've learnt.

French: Has the most needlessly complicated grammar filled with exceptions. Gender for objects is illogical (but I hear that German is even worse in that aspect). More conjugations than English. Spelling is at least as hard as English (e.g. maître, mettre, mètre).

Japanese: Purely phonetic, so arguably the simplest to pronounce and spell. But it's not enough quirks, especially for borrowed foreign words. ’Biru' means beer, while 'Biiru' (hold the 'Bi' for a bit longer) means building. Say/write it wrong and you end up with 'I am drinking a building inside a beer'. It's not really a tonal language like Chinese, but the tone does matter some time. For instance, depending on the intonation, 'Hashi' can mean chopsticks or bridge. Sometime though, you can't distinguish by tone, so have to rely on context. This is when Kanji comes into play. Kanji is meant to make Japanese 'readable' yet I find it so inefficient when you are writing. Something like 口 is simple, but something like 雲 has so many strokes that it unavoidably takes longer to write, is harder to write correctly (and to scale), and when the font is too small, hardly readable!

I am not going to carry on with my list. But yeah, I've asked myself why there isn't an universally language that is logical and efficient. Apparently, there is something in the work, it's just not universal (and most likely never will be - try making every country give up their languages).


I do that all the time, but I still often make mistakes such as typing 'are', 'but' etc., twice for no apparent reason, or worse, getting word order wrong especially when I am writing long posts at 3AM in the morning. That's why 75% of my posts on Hexus end up edited (Word is pretty neat because it highlights instances where I type the same word twice). And that's before I re-read my post before posting. Oddly enough, I don't think that it happens when I write with a pen (unless I do not enough notice it).

All very good points. All languages remain needlessly complicated because of people who resist change and arty farty types who like to make stuff needlessly complex so their poetry works better
French - full of artists = as ridiculous as giving inanimate objects gender.
German - say it like it is - simpler than English and French because Germany's full of engineers. One good example - bra=bustenhalter. Literally Bust holder. Hospital=Krankenhaus. Literally Ill house.
I can't comment on Oriental languages as I know less than 5 words in all of them.

I think the best option is that Arty farty types have no say in the language whatsoever and are forced to use their won language completely. Internationally, we will call this language "bullsh!t".
Problem solved.

[Noxvayl]

All very good points. All languages remain needlessly complicated because of people who resist change and arty farty types who like to make stuff needlessly complex so their poetry works better
French - full of artists = as ridiculous as giving inanimate objects gender.
German - say it like it is - simpler than English and French because Germany's full of engineers. One good example - bra=bustenhalter. Literally Bust holder. Hospital=Krankenhaus. Literally Ill house.
I can't comment on Oriental languages as I know less than 5 words in all of them.

I think the best option is that Arty farty types have no say in the language whatsoever and are forced to use their won language completely. Internationally, we will call this language "bullsh!t".
Problem solved.

Problem would be solved if all countries have there own 1st language everyone within the country uses to communicate on a day to day basis. For example at work or when you are at a pub. Then at school every single country in the world learns a second language which is universal and used to communicate with people that have a different nationality and heritage.

This would allow everyone to be able to communicate with everyone while still maintaining their own heritage in their respective countries.

It has been proven to work very well in South Africa where everyone learns English(either first or second language, which ever you choose) and they have a second language which is their own native language.

So this is not an idea that hasn't been tested yet. It's been used and proven to work very well. There is no need for a loss of identity or an abandonment of your heritage.

[floppybootstomp]

Innit

[matty-hodgson]

Innit

blud

[TooNice]

Problem would be solved if all countries have there own 1st language everyone within the country uses to communicate on a day to day basis.[...] Then at school every single country in the world learns a second language which is universal and used to communicate with people that have a different nationality and heritage.

This would allow everyone to be able to communicate with everyone while still maintaining their own heritage in their respective countries.[...]

We already have a system like this in place. This 'universal language' is English
This does mean that native English speakers do not have much incentive other than personal interests to learn other languages, at least for as long as America remain a leading country in the business world.

[floppybootstomp]

Languages constantly evolve.

If somebody handed you a newspaper printed in Shakespeare's time you'd have a hard job to understand it.

The English language reflects the changing indigineous population, it always has done.

I personally love the English Language, bit geeky even, loved all it's little quirks and idosycrancies (sic?), but we all have to realise that things change.

Having said that, seeing glaring spelling faults in A Level papers does make me just a little bit sad.

[aidanjt]

I don't considering spelling errors to be a major problem, English is an exceptionally robust language. As long as you get the grammar (mostly) right, and at least the first and last letters of a word in the right place you can make out what meaning the sentence is intended to convey. The big problem is when even the basic conjugations in a composition make no sense at all, or are missing entirely.

[TooNice]

As long as you get the grammar (mostly) right, and at least the first and last letters of a word in the right place you can make out what meaning the sentence is intended to convey.

I wonder if that's true for non-native English speakers.
As far as conjugations goes though, it doesn't get much easier than Chinese. 'Yesterday I go', 'Later I go', 'Tomorrow I..' umm, I guess that the word 'will' does exist in Chinese.

[j_r_f]

Standards are changing throughout education.

I have experienced it mostly in the work environment where with some new employees we have had to check their emails before they send them.

The style of language a new graduate can use when communicating with another new graduate is very different to that needed when emailing a senior client who ,at the end of the day, holds the purse strings of a contract.

Common sense is lacking to tailor your style/level of care to the target. When I was at school the target was formality, where it now seems to be more relaxed.

Day to day the biggest problem I have is actually with my mother who insists on sending text speak text messages to my landline. Try understanding one of those when it is read back to you by an automated voice.

[aidanjt]

I wonder if that's true for non-native English speakers.
As far as conjugations goes though, it doesn't get much easier than Chinese. 'Yesterday I go', 'Later I go', 'Tomorrow I..' umm, I guess that the word 'will' does exist in Chinese.

Maybe, but there's well over a thousand symbols to remember, screw that.

[aidanjt]

Day to day the biggest problem I have is actually with my mother who insists on sending text speak text messages to my landline.

Much pain!