A post about grammar in a Japanese web site

[miyukiz]

Hi everyone,

My name is Miyuki.

I have a question about grammar.

I posted the following sentence on a Japanese social networking service, and it was actually harshly criticized saying even my English use was "weird." It is true I still have some learner language and typos, but I did not know what was so bad. It's been one year since I came back to Japan, and I got so anxious and intimidated from the comment.

"One of my pedagogical grammar professors says that we should use the English metalinguistic terms only when we really need. For example, we could only use part of speech even when we explain complex sentence structures."

I fixed "part of speech" to "parts of speech." I thought "pedagogical grammar professor" could have been "a professor in pedagogical grammar", but the previous one is also fine in spoken/informal language. Also, they say I should have put an object after "need." But I thought I did not have to put one, since it may make the sentence lengthy.

What do you think about?

Thank you,

Miyuki

[Jo]

Hi Miyuki: yes, there should be something after "need" - "need to" or "need them". The "pedagogical grammar professor" sounds fine to me. In the first sentence "the" seems superfluous. If I understand your meaning, I would probably phrase the whole thing like this:

"One of my pedagogical grammar professors says that we should use English metalinguistic terms only when we really need to. For example, we should use parts of speech only when we explain complex sentence structures."

Hope this helps.