Thursday, June 13, 2024

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth

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英语He hit the man with a crutch有歧义，既可能是“他用拐杖打了那个人”（with a crutch作状语修饰hit），也可能是“他打了那个拄拐杖的人”（with a crutch作定语修饰the man）。但在汉语中不可能造出兼有这两种意思的歧义语句...
Wednesday, June 12, 2024

Questionable English translation of Karl Marx's words

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[English version follows] 马克思关于家庭的一段中文翻译： “那时就可以看出，妇女解放的第一个先决条件就是一切女性重新回到公共的劳动中去；而要达到这一点，又要求个体家庭不再成为社会的经济单位。”（《马克思恩格斯全集·二十一卷·二、家庭》 http...
Saturday, January 20, 2024

Correcting a petition

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以前写过一篇 Incorrect English in a petition to the White House （或见 微博 ），其中我对一篇请愿书做了改病句、改错词。最近读到内容相似的一篇 '>请愿书 ，英语相对好很多。文章如下，我的评论在括弧中。 S...
Sunday, November 26, 2023

Oxford comma (牛津逗号)

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牛津逗号（Oxford comma），又称连续逗号（ Serial comma ），是指如果并列三个或更多的名词，在倒数第二个名词之后添加逗号。例如 France, Italy, and Spain 假如省略这个逗号，就写成 France, Italy and Spain...
Sunday, October 29, 2023

Shall or will?

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When I learned English thirty plus years ago in China, we were taught to say "I shall", "we shall", and "you will...
Sunday, May 14, 2023

Phonetic symbols /i/ and /u/ in some dictionaries mislead English learners

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Many English dictionaries published in China use /i/ and /u/ symbols to represent the sounds /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ respectively. As a result, some lea...
Friday, April 28, 2023

Study time: vocabulary vs. grammar

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Steve Kaufmann is an undisputed celebrity in the language study community. According to Wikipedia , "[a]s of 2023, he has an understan...
Sunday, January 15, 2023

Grammatical particle 把 in Chinese and word order

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According to Wikipedia , 42% of world languages follow the subject-verb-object (SVO) order, and 45% follow the SOV order. In a Facebook gro...
Monday, November 21, 2022

Translation of a few function words (几个“虚词”的翻译)

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* 作时间副词的“最近”：recently（或lately）仅用于过去。一个较常见的错误是将表示“不远将来”的“最近”也译为recently，此时正确的用词是soon、in the near future、甚至now、currently等，或不译，如“我最近在搬家”（Curre...
Sunday, November 13, 2022

Debate about dropping English as a mandatory course

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The debate in China about keeping or dropping English as a mandatory course in middle school and high school has been going on for at least...