Friday, October 1, 2010

영어 Hint of the Day #8: I cross my finger for your successful English Study!! Wrong.

Everyday, I look at Twitter groups just to see what other English teachers in Korea are teaching.  Part of the reason is to be able to offer my students the best possible combination of informative and interesting examples.  However, what I find is that the Korean teachers who have created these sites have made sites and examples WHICH HAVE ERRORS.  This is a very large problem.  It is annoying at the minimum and makes me angry that you are being taught by people who are clearly not completely fluent.  This is, of course, a weakness of Korean society as a whole, i.e. Koreans accept the idea of "expert" without actually have the qualifications to be one.
That is enough preaching.

Here are an example (this is an actual example that I copied from twitter add-on groups by the "instructor"):

(x)  I cross my finger for your successful ENGLISH STUDY!!

There are multiple errors here.  First, you cannot cross one finger.  It must be fingers.  The definition of cross (the verb) is to take two or more items and make sure that they intersect.  Second, you do not cross fingers for study.  You may cross your fingers for your success,  but not for study.  Here is a potential correction.

(o)  I am crossing my fingers for your success in studying English.
(o)  I will cross my fingers for your success in studying English.

The key points are:
1)  Number agreement is very important in English, and you should avoid errors like the incorrect use of the word finger in the example. 
2)  It is better to make sentences clear and correct, rather than to try making fancy sounding sentences with errors.

See you on the next 영어 Hint of the Day!

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