2010年4月23日 星期五

關於數量的英文字

在學生的教科書中,讀到以下解說:


Normally, if we have the right amount of what we need, we say we have 'enough'. If we have more or less than what we want, we can use some of the words in the following chart:


When we have less than what we want


little, a little, too little


few, a few, too few


When we have more than what we want


lots of, a lot of, too much


many, too many


看起來似乎沒甚麼問題,但當栗問學生,little a little 有甚麼分別時,卻聽到以下驚人答案:


「老師話,little a little 少,好似一蚊和幾蚊的分別。」


甚麼?!little 分明是「少到沒有」的意思,用一塊錢跟幾塊錢的類比,混淆!


其實教科書根本就不應該把 little few 二字放進表格中。現在學生的概念給弄錯了,要糾正很煩耶~~~


8 則留言:

  1. They're all wrong.  Even "few" and "a few" are wrong.  They have nothing to do with what you want or what is enough.
    This textbook is full of it...
     
     

    回覆刪除
  2. And, many, lots of, and a lot of have nothing to do with what's enough either...
    [版主回覆04/24/2010 07:16:00]Teacher: You know, this is an EDB approved textbook! Did the people read this page while they were reviewing?

    回覆刪除
  3. Maybe the text just lists the different expressions, intended for the teachers as a resource.  But this teacher for the kid is too stupid to know any better...

    回覆刪除
  4. Few or little is related to the object that describe. Uncountable objects then it is few. Little in general relates to size. Little drop. Teacher is right, little and few have limited usage in term of enough or not. Usage of language can't really be fully explain in the form of written text.  If Chinese can't why would anyone think other language can? You can never fully learn the language unless you spent sometimes living in that culture.  The best you can hope for from text is that you can express yourself without too much confusion that other people could understand what you try to say.

    回覆刪除
  5. 土☆星人, thank you for your concurrence. 
     
    I generally agree with you on the language and culture thing.  But the words cited by the Chestnut are not those you need to live the culture to know.  I still remember my primary school English teacher's writing on the blackboard:
    a few: 少量
    the few: 僅有
    few: 幾乎沒有

    回覆刪除
  6. In text book, they can only list so many examples. My point was you can't never fully understand the language without having the context of the culture.  You can't expect to learn the language just from reading some text books. That is just the very first step. As long as it is not totally wrong it is a acceptable. There is no perfect text book! Also just saw this girl Ruby's video on YouTube. Her Chinese is worst than me and that bring out something interesting about HK. I guess this is the only place where people expect to learn perfect English when they don't even know their own native language that well. We are ending up with people that don't know neither Chinese nor English.

    回覆刪除
  7. I think we need to think about how did we learn Chinese. There are some words and phases that you can explain to a foreigner learning Chinese and there are some that you can't.  The same is true for English or any other language.  It is impossible to write a perfect language text book for any language.

    回覆刪除
  8. a little, a few....原本是明白的, 看了你這一篇, 又好像混亂了....

    回覆刪除