A Negative Clause - English An native English speaker wrote the following sentence: Most of two syllable words that are not verbs have the stress on the first syllable. At first I found the structure of the sentence seemed odd and after a while it became clear. It then made me wonder why I initially found it odd - it turned out it was the negative clause! I used to say 'except', or 'other than' instead of a negative clause. So for the above sentence I would have written like these: Most of two syllable words, except verbs, have the stress on the first syllable. Or: Most of two syllable words other than verbs have the stress on the first syllable. Now I've learned the third way of expressing it: use a negative clause. So the formula would be like this - subject + negative clause + verb + object Now let me make up a couple of sentences by using a negative clause to describe the subject. -- Most of the Year 12 graduates who were not the top Overall Position 3 or above receivers applied for apprenticeships last year. -- Most of the houses at this region that were not built during the winter Olympic Games have had their roofs replaced by the high-tech materials.

Where a Prepositional Phrase Go in a Chinese Sentence In this short passage I'll explore two types of Chinese sentence structure and will explain where a prepositional phrase should go under the circumstances. There are two basic types of sentence structure in Chinese. While one is made of two elements which are subject and verb, the other consists of three elements which are subject, verb and object. Let me simply list them below: 1) subject + verb 2) subject + verb + object In what orders are they when adding a prepositional phrase to the two types of sentence? Well, in Chinese, the order of a prepositional phrase varies in the two sentences. Still, let me simply put them as formulas: 1) subject + prepositional phrase + verb 2) prepositional phrase + subject + verb + object If you don't like the terms of grammar, I'm going to illustrate them by using sample sentences. I'll show you Chinese sentences first, then I'll also translate the Chinese sentence word-for-word into English without any changes. 1) subject + prepositional phrase + verb 1.1) 我 在北京 工作。 I (in Bejing) work 1.2) 我 在家里 吃晚饭。 I (at home) have dinner） 1.3) 我 在北京大学 读书。　I (at the Beijing University) study 2) prepositional phrase + subject + verb + object 2.1) 在北京，我发现人们常常在饭店吃饭。 (In Beijing) I've noticed that people often (at restaurants) have dinner. 2.2) 在中国，好像人人都学英语。 (In China), it seems everybody is learning English. 2.3) 在澳大利亚，几乎人人都会游泳。 (In Australia), almost everyone can swim.

A Personal Experience - American Accent seems Easy to Imitate For many years I've been learning English from the BBC UK Learning English website. I thought I would pick up the accent eventually if I kept listening to the one accent only. I've never thought about other accents until a few days ago when I met a friend who talked a lot of different English accents. So I decided to have a quick investigation in trying to find something helpful for me to learn specifically how to speak in a particular accent. To my amusement, I haven't found any authentic sources with teaching how to speak (PR) British accent but I've found an American accent one. Then I started working on how to speak in a general American accent. What struck me was that my recordings of my own imitation to the American accent have got positive feedback from native English speakers. I've just worked on it for a few days! Whereas, I've worked on the British accent for many years. Is it telling me that the few days of imitating the American accent trumps the years of imitating the British accent? Although people's opinions on the necessity of learning from common English accents vary based on their own experiences and I think they're all right to some extent, I would insist to advice myself, an adult learner of English, to continuously spending some time on this matter. It has been and will be worthwhile and it'll only help my speech to be easily understandable.

Where Prepositional Phrase Go - in a Chinese sentence vs in an English sentence Languages are fascinating. When we were having a discussion on prepositional phrase in the QQ group, I realized something very interesting: In Chinese, subject + prepositional phrase + verb e.g. 我 在中国 住 （I in China live) In English, subject + verb + prepositional phrase e.g. I live in China. I recall that when I first started to learn English, I always drew comparisons between my mother tongue Chinese and my target language English. As I'm getting better in English and I speak and write in English all the time, it seems that Mandarin's hidden at far back of my brain, I don't think about Mandarin any more. Today when I was talking to a learner of Chinese, Mandarin came back to me. How amasing the brain works!

Should We Learn Grammar (Part One) There have been constantly debates on whether language learners should learn grammar. The questions is actually rather complicated, as a result, there is no one-size-to-all answer to convince all of the puzzled learners. As a learner of English myself, my experience has told me that knowing grammar will be essential and vital at some stages of every one's journey to English proficiency. I'll discuss 'why', 'when' and 'how' in the following paragraphs. Before going to answer why learning grammar is beneficial, let's see what grammar is. In plain language, grammar is a set of rules which account for the constructions of a language. Since adult learners acquire the new language with translation from their mother tongue, they have to be able to identify the different constructions between the old and the new. Without awareness of this, even though their vocabulary is good enough to read in the new language, their spoken and written languages are hardly to sound natural.

Should We Learn Grammar (Part Two) People may argue that children do not learn grammar. That's true children do not learn much of grammar while they grow up with the language and they learn it from what they hear and what they see. In other words they learn it naturally and they do not have a preoccupied language confusing or hinder them. Whereas, adult learners learn a new language from translation in the way of which is absolutely different from children. This makes adult learners seeking help from grammar. The next question would be when we should learn grammar. From my point of view, beginners may focus on building vocabulary and learn pronunciation as well as practising speaking. Too much grammar teaching at this stage might contribute to discouragement. Immediate and advanced learners will certainly benefit from gradually increased grammar intake.

In the Newspaper The usage of 'IN' in the phrase - 'News in the newspaper' , or in the sentence like,'I've read something in the newspaper' - has puzzled me all the time. For me, I would think news are written/printed on the newspaper, not in the newspaper. Then I come to the realisation that news are not something like a cup sitting on the newspaper, and in this sense, news are in the newspaper. I'm fully aware of so called common sense but in different cultures common sense varies. What I'm doing is try to make sense things from other people's perspective. What do native English speakers think about 'news in newspapers? I'd appreciate it if I can hear from you.

Reflection Speaking about further developing my English language skills, I know exactly how to achieve it. The most effective way for me personally is to keep learning English on a daily basis. However, the reality is all too often I failed to keep it up. Now it is the time for me to reflect on where I have gone wrong. When it came to goal setting, I did think of SMART - specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable and timely. I could also follow the scheduled plan for 20, or 30 days even more. My big problem is that after a period of the intensive study, I would certainly have a break unwillingly or unexpectedly due to fatigue and quite often the break would become a longer one. This has certainly had a negative impact on my learning progress. Now the question is, how can I keep up with my plan regularly with no unexpected long breaks? As I reflect on SMART, I think "reasonable" or "realistic" is the key to my achievement. As far as I'm concerned, what I have done wrong is I often try to do too much at a time; I am too ambitious; my intensive study is just too overwhelming. So, in order to have a long term run and to maximise my learning effectiveness, I'm going to reduce the amount of study for each day.

A War of One's Own I booked for an X-Ray a few days ago for a regular health check and this morning my husband dropped me off at the street near the building where I had the X--ray done. The radiographer's a lovely lady and we had a pleasant talk. She's probably at her late 40s and she told me that she had got a pathology degree from a 4 years study many years ago and right now she's doing her second degree in ultrasound as a part-time student. I wonder how many years it will be for her to complete the part-time course. It might take her 6 or 7 years or so. I reckon study has become her way of life which I found it very inspirational. We're in the same boat actually. Though I don't know how she goes through it, I surely know how I cope with it. That is to fight against my own laziness at every moment of the journey. On my way back home, I held 3 pages of the printed map in hands while taking some photos, and walked 7 kilometers in total, arrived home in 80 minutes after. The walking exercise is a good start - the war to fight myself.