If you begin an independent clause with however, you need to preface it with a semi-colon.

I would like to spend the winter break on the beach; however, I do not have enough time or money for such a vacation.

I would have turned the paper in on time; however, my little brother’s dog ate my computer.

Sometimes, however, people prefer to put this word in the middle of a clause, like I just did. Then it needs to be set off by commas.

I would like to watch a movie. I can’t, however, because I have more papers to grade.

If you use however is at the end of a clause, it also needs a comma.

I would like to eat some candy corn. There is none in this apartment, however.

I would like to eat some candy corn. There is none in this apartment, however, so I will have to live without it.

There is no semi-colon before the however in the last example, because however does not begin an independent clause. Compare it with my first two examples. It is at the end of the first clause, as I hope the second-to-last example makes clear.

[further information]

I have started a new twitter account for tweets related to this blog’s theme. Someone had already grabbed my blog’s name over there, so I went with mstoneman_esl.

Here are the most common grammar mistakes I saw in student writing in my history courses this summer. Each one is linked to the page I referenced in my comments in each paper that contained such an error. The first four links lead to the amazing OWL at Purdue, and the last one leads to an article on this blog.

• Run-on sentences
• Sentence fragments
• Parallel structure
• Mixed verb tenses and confusion about the differences between the simple past, past perfect, and present perfect
• Paragraph structure, transition sentences, and introductory and concluding paragraphs.

Native and non-native speakers alike make these mistakes. Some non-native speakers also had trouble with definite and indefinite articles. I always thought that the lack of articles was a peculiarity of Slavic languages, but I found the issue come up with some Korean students too. Some native speakers of Spanish also ran into trouble with the because they use this article differently in their own language.

One way to learn English is to live with an American family and take care of its children as an au pair. I teach a lot of young women who do this. The results are usually quite good, especially in terms of listening and speaking. Unfortunately, some au pairs get matched with families that speak no English at all. This might still work if the au pair can learn English outside of the family. She has to take one English class anyway, but she also needs to spend a lot of time with friends speaking English. Unfortunately, some families have the au pair work far more than five days or forty hours a week. When that happens, she will have a hard time making friends and learning English.

Every au pair that I have taught has stories to tell about the parents and kids, because living with a family and raising kids forces au pairs to come to terms with American culture on a very basic level, starting with manners and food. Most can get annoyed, but they like it here, and many extend their stay from one year to two. Unfortunately, however, there are also families that make their au pair work six or seven days a week, and I have even heard of one that wanted to require its au pair to go to church, as if there were no such thing as freedom of conscience in this country.

The au pair agency is supposed to help au pairs who have been badly matched, but from the stories I hear, the results vary greatly by agency. Every horror story told me has come from someone working for Cultural Care. It seems its counselors have no incentives to make sure that the young women visiting this country have good working conditions. Little wonder, then, that their web page advertises “A flexible, affordable program!” (One possible translation: We can get you someone to work for you for $100 per week and we will not interfere if you make her work six or seven days a week.) By contrast, Au Pair in America has two major links on their modest homepage, “Become a Host Family” and “Become an Au Pair.” This setup reflects the reality I have heard from au pairs who came through this agency. The counselors work for both the parents and the au pairs. If there is a problem, a solution is worked out with both sides in mind.

I would like to be more specific, but I cannot without violating the privacy of students I have had. I just want to get the word out about the consistently bad stories I have heard about Cultural Care. I also want potential au pairs to think about what questions to ask before they sign a contract. Don’t just ask what the host family will expect of you. Find out how the au pair agency operates in this country. What incentives do its counselors have for looking after your best interests and not just those of the host family? How are disputes resolved? These questions matter, because unforeseen problems can easily arise. What if you unexpectedly encounter a family that doesn’t think you should go out at night during your free time? What if a host father thinks nothing of walking into your room when you’re not there and inspecting the contents of your fridge? Or what if no one in the host family eats together or talks, instead turning only to the TV or computer? What if the family lied to you about the working hours? These and many other issues can come up, and you need to have a way to resolve them. Make sure your agency will be on your side.

Learning English is not just about sentence structure, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and intonation. There is also the problem of culture. People talk about different things in different countries, and when they discuss these things, they might use blunt language, euphemistic language, or something in-between. The choice might be personal, but often it is cultural.

One cultural peculiarity of Americans is small talk. For instance, I have no trouble chatting with total strangers while waiting in a grocery store line or for a bus. When I try that in southern Germany, however, people look at me like I am very strange indeed, or so the reactions have seemed to me.

Culture also affects how we talk about ourselves at job interviews, which is the real point of this short post. You see, NPR recently did a story on the challenges non-native speakers encounter in the United States when hunting for a job. Check out Sally Herships, “Overcoming Cultural Barriers To Jobs.”

What do you think? Have you got any cross-cultural stories to share?

For dictionary recommendations, please see my posts on Learning English. I have one for upper intermediate and advanced students, and another for advanced beginner and lower intermediate students.

Strunk and White’s classic Elements of Style turned fifty on Thursday. You can learn more at NPR. And check out Marc Acito’s funny “Who Needs A Manual To Write Real Good?” In it he breaks all kinds of rules in an enjoyably backwards homage to the masters.

I’m a big fan of upper intermediate and advanced ESL students using dictionaries that are only in English. Nonetheless, translation dictionaries are often unavoidable. I know a good German-English translation dictionary at LEO, but I am not sure what the best free options are for other languages. What do you use for your language? Please share this information in a comment here. Thank you!

Related Posts:

• Confusable Words and Online Dictionaries
• Dictionaries Can Tell You How to Use Words
• Beware the Thesaurus

I posted my grammar recommendation for upper intermediate and advanced students to Learning English. Which book? Betty Azar’s, of course.

I’m making these recommendations right now, because one 8-week semi-intensive session at LADO ended and another is beginning. I want students who I will no longer see to be able to continue studying, and I am trying to get my new batch of students to take more responsibility for their own learning. Besides doing the material in their course, I believe students should also study on their own.

I posted my grammar textbook recommendations for beginning and intermediate students to Learning English, a blog that mostly contains information specifically for my ESL students.

I have started another blog specifically for my ESL students at Lado. It is called Learning English. Most of it contains specific course information, but sometimes I offer advice that is relevant to this blog. Yesterday I wrote about using the New York Times to improve one’s word power. Please see TOEFL Reading Comprehension.

Earlier this fall I wrote about language exchanges. Recently I learned that Georgetown University (Washington, DC) has its own free language exchange program. This is no substitute for taking regular classes or working with a private tutor; however, it is an excellent way to improve your fluency.

When learning a foreign language, it is important to practice daily or even more frequently than that. Many readers will say, “But I don’t have time for that!” Sure you do! Really. You just have to let go of the habit of doing a lot of homework and studying all in one long weekly session. Do many short sessions instead. If you only have two hours a week to devote to learning a new language, you could break part of that time up into shorter chunks. You could, for example, take one hour for a long study session. And then you could divide the other hour into four 15-minute sessions. That would give you a total of five sessions in a week. Add to that the class you are probably taking, and you are up to six sessions per week. That will give you the repetition you need to make new words, grammar, and habits of thought sink in. This little amount of time is not ideal. More studying is desirable, but it will bring you a better return on your investment than one long session per week.

Of course, once you get into the habit of these short study sessions, you will find that you can schedule more. What about the five or ten minutes you spend waiting for a bus or train? What about the time you spend on the train? What about when you’re walking? You can’t look at your books then, but you could look at flash cards with idioms, confusing words, or irregular verbs. You could also simply try thinking in the language you are learning. In this way, the two hours you spend learning the language will grow substantially without actually costing you extra time. And because you are studying frequently and regularly, your brain and mouth and ears will grow accustomed to the language more quickly.

And you know what? It can be fun. It takes your mind off your daily troubles and lets you accomplish something in a short period of time. Pretty soon you will notice that you can feel good about this activity, which gives you one more reason to feel good about yourself. These positive feelings will spark you to keep up and even expand this new study habit.

A colleague at LADO International College, where I teach part-time, told me about an intercambios that takes place at a cafe in Washington, DC called Dos Gringos. People meet there to talk in different languages, giving some members a chance to practice Spanish, for example, and then others a chance to practice English, everyone receiving equal time. The languages they currently cover are Spanish, French, Chinese, and Vietnamese, though I imagine people with other skills and interests should contact them too, since Washington is so rich in languages and curiosity.

According to the cafe’s website, such exchanges are popular in Latin America. If you know anything about this phenomenon, please tell me about it in a comment here.

I once did a language exchange with a Russian teacher, when I was working for Sprachstudio Lingua Nova in Munich. We met privately. She taught me Russian and I taught her English. I forget the exact details, but I believe we decided only to do one language per meeting, so as not to get confused. I have also seen two friends meet once per week and do one hour of German followed by one hour of French. Such exchanges might be less effective than a dedicated language course, but it is a good way to share resources, especially if your budget is small. Such exchanges can also supplement a language course. The trick is to have enough discipline to meet regularly and stay in the language being practiced for the time agreed to beforehand.

Irregular verbs present a great challenge for non-native speakers of English. Regular verbs would add an -ed for both the simple past and the past participle. For instance, he cooks becomes he cooked or he has cooked. But many common verbs defy these rules, that is, are irregular. For example, eat becomes ate (past) or eaten (past participle).

He eats his breakfast every morning.
He ate breakfast yesterday.
He has already eaten breakfast today.

How is the non-native speaker supposed to know what to do? There are lists of irregular verbs online, though one must consult a dictionary
to be sure that there is not also a regular conjugation of the same verb. For example, to hang is usually conjugated with hung (past and past participle) in these lists, but if you are talking about hanging a person, the conjugation is regular, that is, hanged.

They hung the picture on the wall.
They hanged the traitor from the tallest tree they could find.

Some verbs also have both an irregular and a regular form of the past participle, but their meaning does not change.

He has sewed patches on the sails.
She has sewn two new blouses.

Three lists that I find useful are those offered by PBS, the Purdue University Writing Lab and Susan Jones (via Georgia State University), who also offers this general explanation of English verbs.

Many people who write think that the only writing tool available for their computer is Word, but there are other word processors. More to the point, there are other kinds of writing tools to help you collect and organize your thoughts. These include mind-mapping applications and outliners. There are also full-screen text editors that can help you to eliminate the many distractions that computers now offer, web applications for when you need to work on someone else’s computer or collaborate with users in different locations, and built-in and online dictionaries.

Choosing the right tools is essential to developing a good writing strategy. This means choosing tools that enhance your ability to think, organize, and write without getting in your way. You can find more information about such tools on my personal wiki. My focus has been on the Macintosh, which I used to write about for my now discontinued blog, On My Mac, but I include links to applications for Windows and other platforms where possible.

I do not teach creative writing, and rarely do I discuss the use of metaphors and similes in the expository essays I correct. Maybe that is why I do not often see strange metaphors and similes in student work. Maybe English teachers live more dangerously than I do. Have a look at this list of bad metaphors and similes, which was supposedly derived from a contest of submissions by English teachers. Unfortunately the person who posted the list did not link to any information about the contest, and I have been unable to verify the context. The list has been making the rounds on other sites, both with and without the identical text about a contest. I doubt teachers would get away with poking fun at their students in this way, but never mind. It is still funny, even if it smells a little like one of those stale emails forwarded to you by the parents and grandparents of everyone in your address book.

Here are three of the twenty-five in no particular order:

Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

Here is the first episode of the British sitcom, Mind Your Language, a show about a class full of non-native speakers learning English. The show is divided into three clips.

This episode is called “The First Lesson.” By today’s standards the show is politically incorrect, insofar as it uses some gender and a lot of national stereotypes to make its points. The students are Greek, German, Japanese, Italian, Pakistani, Indian, Spanish, French, and Chinese. Because this episode first aired on Dec. 30, 1977, I am prepared to cut it some slack and simply enjoy the comedy in it. I invite you to do the same. Nonetheless, it is also interesting to reflect on how far multicultural Western societies have come since the 1970s, when such issues were first making their appearance in mainstream sitcoms. On the other hand, the one bad joke about unemployment benefits is still a nasty stereotype among those who would blame immigrants for all of society’s ills.

The show gets at least one stereotype completely wrong. It has the Chinese student mixing up her Rs with her Ls, which is a common enough mistake among native Japanese and Thai speakers, but not something I have heard any Mandarin speaker do. Most of the language and pronunciation jokes are still funny. In one of the early ones, Ali says to Miss Courtney, “Squeeze me, please.” Of course, he meant, “Excuse me please.” It is also funny to see the native English speakers unwittingly adopting some of these mistakes.

I have taught English to non-native speakers, and I have learned German as a foreign language, so I can sympathize with both sides of the story, and each is funny. Imagine the mixups that Japanese can have when “pray” becomes “play” or when someone from Brazil wants to know where the “beach” is, but says this word with a short I, that is, “bitch.” Of course, I’ve had my fair share of gaffes in German, one time saying “küssen” (to kiss) when I meant “wechseln” (to give change for [money] or to exchange [foreign currency]). And these two verbs don’t even look or sound alike!

So have a look and enjoy. Perhaps afterwards you might share some of your own experiences in a comment below.

Hat tip: I never would have known about this series, were it not for Frank, a British comedy enthusiast on YouTube.

Looking back, I am surprised at how easy it was for me to get through high school and many college courses without knowing a lot of basic vocabulary related to English grammar. I knew English grammar intuitively, and I could write, but I could not talk about grammar. I am lucky I knew enough intuitively, for this weakness could have become a real handicap for me in my studies.

In fact, it did become a weakness in one subject: Russian. We had to take a foreign language at Dartmouth College, and I fulfilled the requirement with Russian. But I was horrible. I do not believe that I ever rose above a C+. Part of the problem was study habits and discipline, but much of it related to my lack of appreciation of the nature of grammar. The professors used terms like genitive case, dative case, direct object, personal pronoun, possessive pronoun, conjugate, and decline, and it seemed like I had to devote too much energy to understanding that vocabulary and the things it indicated instead of learning Russian. Or I missed points entirely because I did not recognize their significance.

I only appreciated this dilemma later, after I took a break from Dartmouth and came back. During my time away I was in the army and stationed in Germany, where I learned to get by with rudimentary German. Upon returning to Dartmouth I decided I would like to learn German properly. My experience was enhanced considerably by a practical little book by Cecile Zorach entitled English Grammar for Students of German. It explained the way English grammar worked for certain situations and then compared it to German. It was through these comparisons that I began to gain an appreciation of the mechanics of English grammar and a vocabulary with which to talk about it. This knowledge later served me well when I found myself in Munich teaching English to Germans. Of course, the learning process never ended.

In this new series, I intend to share basic vocabulary of grammar so that I can use it when trying to explain various things. For example, today I actually wanted to write about the correct and incorrect usage of who and whom, but I found myself talking about direct and indirect objects, and I realized I had to lay a little groundwork first. This is the beginning.

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By the way, English Grammar for Students of German is part of a series that also includes titles for students of Arabic, French, Italian, Latin, and Russian. To learn more, visit the my online bookstore and choose the “English Grammar for Foreign Languages” category.