Wednesday 27 October 2010

subjects, objects and predicates

Yesterday I was finally able to attend my Hungarian class, and the truth is that I was a bit worried that I’d be very much behind because I had lost so many lessons. It turns out there was no reason for me to worry whatsoever. We are in our 2nd year of Hungarian and people were wondering about subjects, objects and predicates. We spent over an hour talking about those. And I thought: What? Again? It was slightly surprising when this happened in Russia: somehow it seemed very odd that university students didn’t know how to analyse the simplest of sentences. And now it’s happening again. This is something I learnt when I was 13 years old. One of the first things we were told when starting high school/6th form/whatever you like to call it, was: "you will all be expected to take a grammar exam. It’s up to you when you decide to take it, but if you don’t pass the test, you will not graduate". And yes, Swedish grammar might be easy, but it does indeed contain subjects, objects and predicates. And some other nice things, too.

You want to know my opinion? This is just sad. We are not talking about complicated grammar structures that do not exist in the Swedish language, but things that people are supposed to know. If it continues like this, I’d rather just do the homework, pass the exams and spend the rest of the time doing something useful instead of listening to people trying to figure out the difference between a subject and a predicate.  

Yeah yeah, I know. I should be nice and understanding: but, and there is a big but here. Nobody will ever remember all the information they stuffed their heads with in school and nobody can know everything, but for cow’s sake: if you are going to study a language, please do your classmates the favour and try to revise the most basic stuff if you’re unsure, or ask the teacher beforehand, or in private. Some of us are actually there to learn something, instead of repeating things we’ve known for ten years or so.

3 comments:

knickknacks said...

Well, look on the bright side - at least you didn't miss anything for the past few sessions! ;)

Anonymous said...

I completely agree with you. I'm in an advanced Russian class and people still don't know some basic grammatical terms, which I think is very ridiculous.

Zsuzsi said...

knickknacks: that is so true, and I can miss a few more without feeling too guilty :)

Natalie: it is ridiculous AND annoying. In Moscow I was in a class with people who supposedly knew Russian really well, but it was so frustrating because they a) hardly never showed up to class so we were always repeating everything several times, and b) they had no clue about basic grammar.