Something that catches a lot of English as second language people out is the correct time to use the gerund form (i.e., the '-ing' form). For instance,
(1) I am walking to the shops.
is clear -- it is occurring in that moment. But what about the subtle difference between (2a) and (2b)?
(2a) I live in Berlin.
(2b) I'm living in Berlin.
To me -- a native English speaker -- (2b) implies that the speaker generally lives elsewhere, while (2a) doesn't. But they're both technically correct if the speaker is, at that moment, a resident of Berlin.
There are more examples I could give. Teaching these sorts of subtleties, though, and mastering them can be very difficult.
A final example that I really like, and one that my syntax lecturer used to use a lot:
(3) She would have had to have been being watched.
Seven (or maybe six, depending on how you view 'watched') verbs in a row! Native English speakers grasp this really intuitively, but non-native speakers may have trouble parsing these into a coherent picture. To illustrate this -- try and gloss this sentence another way while conveying the meaning. If you speak another language, try and translate it! English verbs are hard.
Regarding your example with the gerund, yes it is subtle, but similar subtleties exist in German, e.g. The difference between perfect and simple past (also exist in English), which many native speakers in both English and German get wrong as well.
An interesting anecdote (which might be related) is, that in my experience having gone to high-school in the US for a year and having done language courses with Australian teachers, that there seems to be much less education on the grammar of the language than in Germany. I often knew the "theory" of English grammar much better than the native speakers (doesn't mean I was better at applying it though).
All that said, mastering English is still difficult, just not due to the grammar. Spelling is one thing, but also the vocabulary is huge. Supposedly Shakespeares vocabulary was 60000 words, the equivalent German poet Goethes was less than 40000.
You're pretty much expected to have the grammar down by high school, where the focus shifts to composition (essay courses, etc.)
This was my experience growing up here anyways. The last time I had a test question ask me to circle the past participle was middle school (and the SAT).
I didn't know terms like that in England in the 2000s, though I picked them up from learning other foreign languages later.
I have heard university professors complain that they can say, simply, "rephrase the paper into the active voice" to a student from <anywhere else>, but many British students don't know what that means.
England now teaches more grammar, but it is not much use generalizing from individual experiences of a particular state/country in a particular decade.
YMMV; curricula are highly local.
Well, now I want to see how this sentence would be translated into all the other major languages! I immediately understand the meaning, but can see why it might be hard for a non native speaker to understand. Are their other languages that can say the same thing as concisely?
Google Translate must absolutely butcher this sentence. I just tried Spanish. “Habría tenido que haber estado vigilada.” I know Spanish well enough to know that is hilariously incorrect, but not well enough to know the correct translation.
“Tendrían que haber estado mirándola.”
“Vigilado” is a much stronger word and to me it would be much more like “guarded”
Ive studied Chinese before and a translation eludes me.
If anybody can help, my guess the trick is in : “ 本来就” of 她本来就必须被监视
For example, in Hebrew, I would translate the sentence as חייב להיות שמישהו היה צופה בה, which literally translates as "it must be that someone was watching her". Trying a more literal take, היא הייתה חייבת להיות צפויה, not only (by sheer necessity) injects the infinitive tense into the middle of the sentence, but also would just cause a native speaker to ask you in English, "why don't you tell me in English what you're really trying to say?"
I both admire and pity translators who work for organizations such as the U.N. as they have to translate documents such as treaties and do so with great precision.
However, I suppose my major concern with translations is how sloppy some actually are—that is that errors in translation are not limited by structural limitations caused by differences in the languages as in your example but rather by sheer carelessness. Frankly, I'm fed up with seeing bad translation of subtitles from German into English. I'd be more than happy if I had a dollar for every time I've seen the verbs glauben (to believe) and wissen (to know) interchanged with one another during translation.
Clearly, to know something is very different to believe something but unfortunately it seems that significant numbers of translators find such precision unnecessary.
I would translate it as "debería haber estado vigilada". DeepL translate it as "tendría que haber sido vigilada". Both are much easier to understand.
It's a sentence that would typically be spoken rather than written, but it's only a step beyond "you would have had to have been there", which has genuine occurrences in Google Search.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22You+would+have+had+to+hav...
Anyways, the translation would be: तिला पाहिलं गेलं असतं
Sie hätte unter Beobachtung gewesen sein müssen.
Still a sentence with 4 verbs though.
E: Interestingly enough, google translate is just plain wrong in a predictable way:
Sie hätte beobachtet werden müssen.
Which implies that she should have been watched.
その場合、彼女は監視されていたはずであろう。
As a reply to the question, “what’s the most expensive car on the market?”
1) “I’m guessing it’s some German supercar.”
2) “I would guess it’s some German supercar.”
3) “I guess it’s some German supercar.”
As a native speaker, the first two both sound correct to me, and essentially equivalent. The third sounds a little weird, even though it’s grammatically the simplest. I can’t put my finger on exactly why.
Usually it's an error to add -ing to a mental process (Are you knowing the answer?, I'm believing in a deity, etc.). (We can choose to construe a mental process as a material one - it's not a lexical rule about those verbs, but a grammatical means we have access to, e.g. I'm lovin' it, I'm thinking about you contrue them as an activity rather than a mental state.) But perhaps the reason why replacing "guessing" with "guess" changes the meaning so much is because "I guess" is already taken. It should modify the meaning as "I think x" => "I'm thinking x" does, but saying "I guess" sounds like a way of hedging information from a 3rd party.
In danish the word "Ligeglad" is the state of mind for 3).
Admittedly both are subtle and somewhat confusing to non-native speakers.
"Fred, riding a big elephant, burst into the arena" substitutes "pink" for a more common name and adds the article and a prepositional phrase and... some grammar that I can't put into words right now and makes it a full sentence.
I guess what I'm trying to get across is that without the adjective order being in line, it's hard to work out the sentence structure which is extremely reliant on word order in lieu of inflection.
In my native dialect, statements including "had to have been being" are rather common. My friends, family, co-workers, etc. use them regularly. In fact, I recall saying "he'd have had to have been being reckless" just earlier today. All five of the other people present- both immediate family and non-relatives from this area- knew precisely what was meant. In other words, that intimidating clump of verbs passed unremarked.
Further, to andensande's point, one might be inclined to replace that god-awful monstrosity with something like "he must've been reckless." To do so would be to wipe out some subtleties of meaning from the original. A replacement like "he must've been acting recklessly at the time" feels like the same general meaning to me, but it also sounds stuffy and snobbish in tone (for all that it's probably a much more effective construction).
All things considered, every language that I've ever dealt with in any capacity has had its share of peculiarities. In hindsight, however, I don't recall Arabic, Zulu, or even Gallo-Lati... er, I mean French... having quite as few peculiarities as my sponge-like mother tongue.
"to be ing", "was ing", and "will be *ing" if I remember correctly, are actually thought to be an early borrowing of celtic grammar. Not much celtic anything was adopted into English, but there's a possibility that this sentence structure may be one of the few contributions of the celtic languages that were displaced by germanic Anglo-Saxon languages that eventually formed English.
(1) She would have had to have been observed.
is that it misses out the gerund form preceding 'observed', which alters the meaning slightly in my opinion. It's difficult to get at precisely but I feel like the original sentence has a feeling of time-boundedness around when she was observed which you don't get without that gerund. I think?
The original with "been being watched" feels like something the detective says when he first discovers the fact about watching. It has an exclamative aspect to it. There's a present sense of realization, mixed with the past sense of when the watching had taken place.
"She would have had to have been observed." is something like a lawyers distillation of what happened later for the court.
That being said, I have trouble to parse the original english sentence so I may be missing subtleties.
Re rewtriting (3) though: does not the following suffice? "She must have been being watched".
I can imagine an argument that "She would have had to have" is not equivalent to "She must have" on grounds that the "have had" might suggest additionally that the past-ongoing-watching no longer occurs. I don't really think this flies, though, since the natural reading of "been being watched" already suggests to me that the watching was relegated to the past ("been" being interpreted as only connoting the past, not the "inclusive-or"-type interpretation "previously and perhaps presently"; much as "or" itself is - to my chagrin! - generally interpreted exclusively in standard parlance).
I couldn't think of how to simplify the "been being" though; that is a tough nut.
OK, now I feel like I don't know English. Is this proper English? What does it mean? How is it different from "She would have had to have been watched"? Is the meaning clear to people? I'm scratching my head...
Did you mean "She would have had to have felt like she's being watched"?
Essentially it means “it must have been the case that, at the moment we’re speaking of, someone was watching her.”
Your sentence is slightly different, in that it implies that, in general, someone was watching her during the timeframe we’re talking about, but not necessarily in the exact instant we’re talking about. Also, like the example above, your version could mean she’s someone who in general is watched (like the person who generally lives in Berlin), as opposed to someone being watched right during the instant we’re talking about.
Complicated!
Another native English speaker here. This would be how I would parse "She had to have been being watched," but I think it's not quite the full picture in this sentence's case. It's important to note that the "would" adds the implication that this conclusion is being drawn based upon some other (possibly unspoken) observation or proposition.
I would say the meaning is probably closer to "In order for some unspoken condition to be true, it must also be true that, during the moment of time in the past about which we are speaking, someone was watching her."
Ugh, I have to admit it seems technically "correct" after all :-) but with such a painful (and uncommon) sentence structure that it makes you question if it's right...
There are subtleties involved, but the most basic use case is that the former refers to an action that took place before some point in the past (to which the sentence refers), while the latter refers to an action that was still happening at that past point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Pas...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Pas...
"She would have had to have been watched" means she would have had to have been watched at that moment (e.g. because someone was watching the area where she did whatever it was), whereas "being watched" implies that the watching was ongoing and therefore that someone was continuously watching her at the time.
It's a very contorted phrase. I struggle to think of a context in which it makes sense. I honestly don't know what it's supposed to mean. It's a mixture of subjunctive mood and passive voice, both of which detract from clarity.
You can make unclear grammatical constructions in any language. If your aim is clarity, and not obfuscation, then you just eliminate tangled grammar such as this example.
I will attempt to offer a re-phrasing with added context, though:
"The only way that anyone could have known X about her, would be if she were being observed."
(Many english speakers would substitute "was" for "were", because the subjunctive mood is rarely taught to schoolchildren in the UK. That is to say, colloquial english is generally pretty sloppy.)
If a native english speaker like me struggles with an english phrase, there's something wrong with that phrase. If I find myself constructing a phrase like that, my first instinct is that my thoughts must be unclear, because my words are unclear. I'd consider thinking again, and perhaps even re-writing an entire paragraph, just to avoid a phrase like that.
The subjunctive in German is routine and explicit. Indeed, the word "were" in my re-phrasing is pronounced in parts of northeast of england to rhyme with "bear", because it comes from the germanic subjunctive "wäre". But in general, subjunctives in English are concealed - we don't use subjunctive forms of verbs much, the listener is supposed to infer subjunctive mood from the presence of words like "if" and "would".
Twain is winding us up; after all, he was a satirist. The German language is pretty regular, compared with English. It's quite easy to learn. English must be a nightmare to learn, as a foreigner.
It doesn't sound natural to me at all; it sounds incredibly awkward to me. In a situation like that, I think people would say something like "someone would've been watching her at that moment".
(And I meant to write "would've"; the "would've had have been" was just a typo...)
But you're not; you're talking about having been being watched, something that was an ongoing process at the time (past progressive).
> And whether it's sinister or not is pretty beside the point.
People choose their phrasing because they want to convey particular connotations. So you can't just say "this is a simpler way to say the same thing" if it carries different connotations.
> I'm saying that phrasing is pretty darn unnatural English, sinister or not.
All I can say is it sounds perfectly natural to me, as a native (British/Irish) English speaker.
Of course you do. Consider "Do you ever feel like you're being watched?" versus "Do you ever feel like someone's watching you?" Both those sentences are natural English and in a certain sense they "mean the same"; nonetheless they convey a quite different feeling, and neither is a replacement for the other.
> Of course you do. Consider "Do you ever feel like you're being watched?" versus "Do you ever feel like someone's watching you?"
I was talking about in that example. I was not making a claim about every arbitrary sentence containing the phrase "being watched".
Understand that if you add enough contortions and make a sentence jarring enough, you won't get anything across without additional context. (To a human I mean. I guess I have to add that caveat because other you'll post another rebuttal about how a sufficiently strong AI would parse it just fine.)
For context, I was born and raised in Northern NJ with Jamaican parents, and have lived in Michigan for the past 10 years. I have never heard anyone use grammar like this.
I assure you the feeling is mutual :/. It really does sound perfectly normal to me. I can easily imagine e.g. Jonathan Creek saying exactly that.
Wow, whoever concocted that mind-twister? That's the sort of problem we students would have given our formal logic lecturer to analyze and draw up into truth tables.
That expression likely exceeds the complexity of an infamous expression (known for its complexity) that was given to us students to analyze, it being 'there is a chance of a possible maybe'.
It hurts my brain just thinking about it, perhaps I'll do so later. ;-)
“Someone must have been watching her.”
I’m making some assumptions about the context of the sentence—but as long as you told me what the context was, I’m sure I could come up with an equally simple replacement.
Personally, I found the original sentence quite hard to parse, despite being a native speaker. It’s not good writing and a good editor would replace it.
Russian grammar and vocab plus the different alphabet were incredibly intimidating, but the different declensions became familiar very quickly. I was familiar with conjugation from Spanish, so that was just a bit of memorization. I like how clear the alphabet and spelling are. Once you learn how to sound things out, you're good to go besides very few exceptions. Everything is very regular, there's just a lot of tenses and moods to get acquainted with. Perfective and imperfective verbs are still something I have to learn on a word-by-word basis.
German grammar was easy except for the different cases. I'd already been exposed to cases with Russian, so I don't know why it's so much harder for me in German. Maybe because I expected it to be closer to English. It's weird the way I can listen to a sentence in German and it feels like I know what they're saying, but if I try to translate it, I don't have a clue.
I don't think you can really class languages by difficulty. You just have to immerse yourself in each. Even in those with recent spelling and grammar revisions, getting the ear for it and using it is the key.
In the first day of Koine Greek class, the instructor asked who had programming experience. She made a point of stressing, as she would again, that unlike computer languages, human languages show no signs of design, and not to spend any time looking for it. It was good advice.
As a native English speaker, this is definitely a big plus. I've had German friends who've regularly expressed frustration that there's often no real rhyme or reason or pattern to either English spelling or pronunciation; you just have to memorize it. (Though I could largely say the same of German and French noun genders, even if there are some patterns that are somewhat [but not entirely] consistent.)
Meanwhile, spelling and pronunciation in German seems to be pretty bijective. If you know how an unfamiliar word is pronounced, you can generally accurately know how it's spelled, and if you how an unfamiliar word is spelled, you can generally accurately know how it's pronounced.
PHP is a programming language, and it shows every sign of having been designed to the same level of detail as English.
This is the point I came to with German and was at a level where I could start speaking it (poorly but enough to be understood) all the time with native speakers. I read up on some things from time to time but mostly ignore a lot of the theory as a child would and just refuse to switch to English as much as possible. It's probably slower this way but it's been one of the few ways I've actually been able to be consistent with practice.
I was always an average foreign language student, until I started to learn German living in Berlin and to speak English at work.
Now I'm fluent in both languages. I forgot most of the German rules I learned during my first months in Berlin taking crash courses. I just know sentence structures because I heard them and used them so often. Like a child, really.
In German class, away from that bordertown, outside where the dialect is common, I never paid attentention. Teachers would require me te learn tables filled with exceptions, weird strings of words (mit nach bei..) etc. I simply refused. I often didn't bother to go to class.
Just using the Fingerspitzengefühl that comes with the part-German dialect, was adequate. 7/10 on my exams. So certainly not fluent or even good. At the diploma-handout, the German teacher told me she did not want to, but was required to give me that grade (why a teacher would disclose this to an 18/yo is beyond me, though. There certainly was spite).
Point is: even sideloading a language from a young age helps learn it. At least for n=1.
Oh how absolutely true this statement is. As an adult, I find myself deconstructing and atomizing every aspect of the language I'm learning and then reconstructing it bit by bit into English. Not only does this approach slow one's progress down to a crawl but also it limits one's fluency even after one has some basic understanding of the language. [Incidentally, I found this to be more of a problem with French than with German even though I was taught French at a much younger age.]
From my observations, I have noticed that I'm not alone in having adopted this approach, especially so for some of us with a technical bent. It seems to me that we adopt the same analytical approach to learning a language as we do to when learning a technical skill or analyzing some physical phenomenon. Clearly this is the wrong when it comes to learning languages but it's a very difficult habit break. In a similar vein, I recall getting somewhat annoyed when trying to learn Morse code and making no progress. Whilst I was told never to analyze the individual dots and dashes of characters but nevertheless I still did and it was not until I broke this habit (with some difficulty mind you) and that I listened only to the rhythm of the sound of each character that I started to make progress.
Obviously, learning a language is a much more difficult exercise than learning Morse code but the same rules apply in both instances. I recall several decades ago attending a lecture by Noam Chomsky and he made a comment that I have never forgotten as it resonated with me then and ever since. That was that he—a world renown linguist—had difficulty in learning languages—and he cited words to the effect 'that a new language can waft down the corridors of MIT and that most of his colleagues catch it with ease as it passes by—except for him'.
Even at the time of the lecture, I could not help but think that he like me dissects and atomizes a language in ways his colleagues have learned not to do (but perhaps when you're a linguist that approach may be useful—after all, Chomsky is very famous and his colleagues are seemingly very much less so).
Not really. Language as a system is pretty well understood. What appears to be exceptions or non-sense when learning a language often have a simple explanation when looking at the evolution of the said language.
I wish they would pound that forcefully into the grammarians torturing children in school.
I look at the grammar they teach, and I think someone got paid to make stuff up.
Regarding Twain's complaints, the biggest lesson I learned from learning german at an older age was: languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all, the faster you will advance. Children do not learn languages by being analytical and by comparing to what they already know, they learn by just accepting it as it is. This leads to a funny phenomenon that foreign speakers know the actual rules of a language better than most native speakers, simply because native speakers know things are as they are, but not why. Whether adults are capable of this is a different question, but trying to find logic in a language will only lead to frustration.